The Journal
by BlackHalo1227
Summary: After a long standing career as a squad leader at the Xavier's Institute, Tristan Olivera was killed in the line of duty. And for him, it was only the beginning.
1. Chapter 1

_**Introduction – How It All Began**_

_The old brick building stood in one of the worst sections of the city. A tower four-story brownstone seemed somehow out of place, and the sign on the front advertising a used bookstore only made the image that much more surreal. _

_Madeline frowned at the face of the building once more and tugged hard on the door handle, expecting to find it closed, or hear the rattle of chains on the other side. Too many places were closing down anymore. Too few people took any pleasure in reading any longer._

_The door swung outward with barely a squeak, throwing Madeline off balance. After a moment's surprise she darted in through the dark opening, and stopped, allowing her eyes to adjust._

_The darkness receded and was replaced by a warm glow of light from overhead. She gasped as the store came into focus. It was like her own personal heaven. Miles and miles of shelves ran the length of the brownstone, with piles of books set beside them. Monstrous iron staircase wound their way around the outside of the room, ascending to even greater heights, and presumably more books. _

_And behind the counter was the old man who had told her about the place._

_"Well hello there." His words were rote, as though the greeting were something used thousands of times. "What can I help you- It's you!"_

_The young girl smiled at the expression on the kooky old man's face. He was of small stature, with a long white beard and wild hair which wouldn't have looked out of place on a wizard from some of her books. "Yeah. I told you I'd find the place."_

_"Bags, girl! I tell hundreds of people about this place, but none of them ever show up!" He leaped to his feet and came around the corner, grabbing her hands and leaping up and down. "It's been years since anyone your age has come in here. Normally its old folks who want to look important buying lots of old books for their libraries; but a young girl, who actually wants to read! This is a great day!"_

_Madeline laughed. She really liked the old man._

_"Come, come," he shouted over his shoulder, leading the way towards the stacks. "I'll send you home with your arms so full of books that you'll need a year to read them all!"_

_Madeline followed the old man closely, burdened all of a sudden by an intense fear of becoming lost among the stacks and never found again. She needn't have worried though, the old man, whose name was Zedd, trotted along at the pace of a man much younger than his apparent years, stopping here and there to point out an especially rare book, or some nifty author or another._

_"Zedd," Her voice was nervous, brittle, and far too loud in such a place. "Have you read all of these books! There must be millions of them!"_

_Zedd stopped and looked at her as he swiveled around, his lean frame filling up much of the space between the shelves. "The last one is on my desk, I was reading it as you came in," He followed the words with a smile and sly wink. "How old are you, Madeline?"_

_"Fourteen."_

_"I've been running this bookstore since before your parents were born. For nearly fifty years, I've lived among these shelves, sheltered by the experiences of other people's characters, and other people's thoughts." He paused "I am familiar with every book in this building… I know who it was written by, and what the basic story is about, but in response to your question no, I have not read them all. It would take hundreds of years to even think of accomplishing such a feat."_

_"Oh.Okay" She dropped her head, a little ashamed that she hadn't thought of how long it would take to read so many books._

_Zedd chucked her under the chin with his long bony fingers. "Come on, kiddo, the ones you asked me about the other day are back here."_

_Madeline beamed a bright smile at him. "You remembered?"_

_"Yes, ma'am. Of course, I did."_

_He led her further into the building, and up one of the cool iron staircases, following its spiral curve around a column of some kind of stone._

_"Did you know that these staircases were built originally as a way to help defend castles, little one?"_

_"Really?" Madeline thought about it for a minute. "Did it make it easier for the soldiers to push people down them or something?"_

_Zedd laughed, the sound echoing up through the stacks of books. "No, no, nothing like that. You see… most swordsmen at the time were right handed. When they came up the stairs, their sword arms were against this middle column." He thumped the stone with his hand for good measure. "The men above them though were also right handed, and thus had their arms free to fight." Zedd made a grand gesture with his arm, complete with the sound effects as he sword fought with an imaginary foe. "Made it so that the men on the top would have the best advantage."_

_"Nifty."_

_"Ah, here we are." He threw his arms wide indicating an alcove of shelves nearly three times his own height. "Native American Folklore. One of the more interesting topics that I've come across in recent years. There was so much history to these people." His voice took on a reverent tone with a note of sadness. "We destroyed so much when we came to this land… we know only a fraction now of what we might have known if we had shared our land with them, rather than trying to claim what they already lived upon."_

_"Aww… don't be sad, Zedd. You weren't there, you didn't force them away, and you know, you can't change the past."_

_"You know, you're pretty bright, kiddo. Where'd you get so smart."_

_"Reading."_

_The old man laughed again, an uproarious sound, cantering through the books, loud enough that Madeline felt a little uncomfortable with her own joke. _

_"Clever girl. Anyways, I'll leave you to look through the books here. I'll be just a few shelves away, dusting off some of King Arthur's books."_

_Madeline was already absorbed in the books on the shelf by the time the comment registered. "Wait, what do you mean, King Arthur's books. King Arthur is the character in the book!"_

_Zedd's voice drifted up from far away, out of her sight. "The books belong to the characters within them, little one. The stories they tell, the lessons they teach. They belong to them."_

_Madeline nodded, not quite understanding what he meant, and then returned quietly to the books around her._

_Titles leapt out at her, catching her attention. _Spirit of the Wild. Black-Elk Speaks. Of Wolf and Man. _There were hundreds that she wanted to take with her. They called to her. _Cherokee Medicine. Inuit Legends and Myths._ There were too many to choose from. _

_That's when she saw it. _

_The book was on a shelf far above her head. It was bound in simple, unmarked leather, tied off with another scrip of the same material. _

_"Zedd!"_

_The old man appeared as if from nowhere next to her, his eyes wide. "Good heavens above girl, I thought something had happened to you! Don't do that!"_

_"Sorry." Her sheepishness passed almost instantly as she fixated upon the book in question. "What's that book up there?" She strained against gravity attempting with her pointed finger, to draw herself up to it._

_Zedd squinted and focused his eyes upon the leather bound volume in question. "Well, I'll be damned."_

_"Zedd! Don't curse. Now what is it?"_

_"A book, little one-"_

_"Well, duh!"_

_Zedd shushed her with a wave of his hand. "It's a book that I thought we had lost long ago." He began slowly climbing one of the leaning ladders, sending a cascade of dust down over the lower shelves. "I lost track of this volume nearly twenty years ago. What it's doing in this section, I have no idea. It's a handwritten journal, reputed to have been written by a dead man."_

_"How would a dead man write a book? That seems kind of silly to me."_

_"Shush, child, you must understand that in the old days there were men of great power. Men and women who could manipulate the forces of the world with merely an effort of will. In such a world, does it seem so strange that a dead man could, and would, write a book?"_

_Madeline thought about it for a moment as Zedd continued his journey up the ladder. Dust was raining down from everywhere now, as he grabbed hold of the leather and began to pull. After a brief flash of brilliance, she backed away from the bookshelf and the tottering old man._

_With a cry of triumph, Zedd pulled the book loose of its moorings and nearly toppled from the ladder._

_"On Life After Death…" He chirped to himself as he climbed carefully back down. "Interesting reading material… not for the faint of heart, I think." _

_At the bottom of the ladder, he held out his hand, displaying a leather portfolio, filled nearly to overflowing with unbound handwritten pages. The unit was worn, the leather soft and supple, like velvet. Desire seized hold of Madeline and she reached out her hand to touch the material._

_Zedd stepped back pulling the book with him. "Are you sure you want to read this, little one? Some books are not to be opened with impunity."_

_"Zedd." She tapped her foot as she leveled a flat stare at him. "You wouldn't have gotten it down from there if you hadn't wanted me to read the book, what's with the lecture?"_

_"This book… it is not something to be taken lightly." He shook it gently, and turned it over. Pause. "On the other hand, if you noticed it… I think you're supposed to read it. I just want you to be sure of what you're getting yourself into young one. Maybe wait a few years?"_

_"Come on, it can't be that bad. Let me see it."_

_The old man held his hands out and surrendered the book with a sigh. For a split second, his hair whipped around him and framing his lean body with an ancient dignity, as it the whole world had sighed along with him._

_"It's yours, kiddo. Just be careful what you do with it, alright?" _

_Madeline looked up at him, her eyes bright with tears of happiness. She opened her mouth twice to try and thank the old man, but the words just wouldn't come out. No one had ever given her a book before… especially not one this important._

_"Go on," his voice was softer now, and his expression one of a loving grandfather. "Run along with that, and don't forget to come and visit a tottering old fool in the future."_

_Madeline smiled as she headed back to the front door. "But… Zedd, where would I find one of those?"_

_He smiled again. "You're a good kid, Madeline. Take care."_

_Madeline trotted out of the store, clutching the portfolio of pages to her chest as if it contained all the treasures of the world. _

_She never heard the door lock behind her._

_Some hours later, Madeline walked up the driveway to her family's home. Neither her mother nor father would be home for many hours yet, so she proceeded into the house and dropped the portfolio on the kitchen table as she made herself a cup of noodles._

_Noodles in hand she did a quick check of the locks on the doors, making sure all of them were in place, and then proceeded upstairs to her bedroom. Throwing on a pair of loose fitting sweats, she lay down on her bed, noodles in one hand, and began to sort through the free floating pages in front of her._

_Neatly printed dates and times in the upper corner of each entry made her job easier. For nearly three-quarters of an hour Madeline combined, shuffled and stacked the papers, maneuvering herself around the bed in order to keep them in a rough chronological order. Some days had several entries, and at other points there were weeks, even entire months missing from the timeline. All in all she guessed that it covered a period of roughly seven years worth of entries. Some of the pages were worn and cracked with age, others yellowed and barely readable, but even with, or perhaps in spite of these facts, Madeline could hardly believe that such a treasure had come into her possession._

_When the task was finally finished, Madeline hefted the first set worth of papers and settled back against her bed pillows. _

On Life After Death  
Tristan Olivera

_Madeline set the last of her noodles aside, and wrapped a blanket about her waist and shoulders as a chill descended on the room. She checked the clock by her bedside, and prepared herself to dive into a world which had long since passed her by._

**_- end chapter -_**

_My name is Tristan Olivera. _

_I died on July 23rd, 2005._

_What follows, is a recounting, as best I can remember, of the events following my death. But first, there is something that I need to say._

_To my dearest friends and loved ones. _

_Sam._

_Mimi._

_Margo._

_Harmony._

_I love you all._

_Please forgive me._

_In the beginning, I could still hear the sounds._

_The sound of a young woman, crying, begging and pleading for her brother to come back to her._

_The sound of someone screaming her heart out, venting her fury at the world. A fury so strong that the world quivered and trembled at her wrath._

_The sound of a queen, somewhere far away, weeping on her throne at the unfairness of it all. At the pain of trading one loss for another._

_And then, even that was taken from me as I fell through the never-ending blackness._

_It was some time later that I noticed the wind and the noise below me. Time passed again, though whether it was an instant or an eternity, I couldn't tell. Then all of a sudden I found myself plunged into an icy cold river. There was nothing but blackness above or below the surface, and I could feel it carrying him, further into whatever nightmare this darkness embodied. _

_Part of me wondered if it would really be so bad, to give in and let the waters carry me beyond the blackness to a better place. Surely there would be a better place for me… and I was so very tired of fighting. It would be nice to stop fighting._

_Yet something inside of me raged at the idea. I could feel my blood boiling and my hands moving of their own accord, dragging along the bottom of the cold river until finally they caught upon something solid enough to hold me against the onslaught of running water. Rational thought was thrown out the window as fury took over and I began to fight harder and harder against the current._

_Inch by inch I dragged myself along the river bottom, water flowing all around, begging me, beckoning me to give in to its sweet, sweet voice. When that failed, it began to threaten me, but the words were empty and there was no turning back now. The cold faded away to nothingness, the water ceased to be anything more than an annoyance, and soon I felt it. _

_In the distance, far beyond the range of my normal senses, there was a light in the blackness. There was something there; a place where he could escape both the river and the blackness that plagued me so. _

_I let loose a roar of fury as the river redoubled its efforts to push me back. I shoved my face back under the water and dug my hands in, following the river bottom straight towards my escape. _

_Towards life._

**_- end chapter –_**

_  
First Entry  
Date and Time Unknown_

_At some point over the last few days, I made a conscious decision to write all of this down. It seems unbelievable, even to me, who spent the last few years of my life living amongst the most extraordinary people in the world. _

Tristan looked down at the sheet of loose paper in front of him, and at the thick, black furred hands that scribed his thoughts upon it. How long had it been that he thought that this body of his was gone for good?

_Though I don't yet understand the nature of this place, I can sense that in some ways it is similar to the world that I am used to. Time seems to flow in roughly the same fashion, and measurements appear to be roughly equivalent, though I've had no one to confirm or deny these suspicions for me. It seems once more, I am all alone. _

Visions flashed before his eyes of the fight that had sprung up during the last danger room scenario. Too many people were hurt and that **thing**, whatever it was, just didn't seem to taking enough damage. The scene took over his mind's eye and he found himself forced to watch Mimi fall to her knees, hit by a blast from its midsection.

He reached for the pen but his hands shook too much and his eyes wouldn't focus well enough. He knocked it to the floor.

The air rushed by him as he charged the Apocalypse-creature. A roar of fury chased all fear from his heart as he leapt at the thing, claws extended to tear that light spewing mid-section to pieces.

And then it had opened.

After that there was the blackness, and then the wires were everywhere. It was like he had blinked and they had all suddenly materialized in front of him. In some small part of his brain, Tristan realized that they were part of its core; something that could cause it true and undeniable pain.

Another roar ripped through his lungs and out into the negative space as he began to rip and tear at the wires. He poured every last ounce of energy into destroying everything in sight.

Right before the blackness reclaimed him, Tristan heard the creature roar in pain.

His last thought echoed throughout the dark.

"Good."

When Tristan's eyesight cleared he found himself lying with his head upon the side of the overturned paper roller that he had been using as a desk, his fur sticky with the ink he had spilled. Cursing, he sat up and right the bottle quickly, thankful that he had lost only half of its contents due to his clumsiness.

_To experience your own death… and to find yourself on the other side, still able to remember it, seems very strange to me. I can not believe that this lonely, desolate landscape is Heaven, nor am I willing to accept that the grace of my actions has landed my within the pits of Hell, and so I am forced to pursue another answer. _

_This is the point where Cassidy would tell me to use my brain, and the gifted senses that I'd been born with, which is what I have been trying to do. The place I woke up seems to be an old abandoned factory. I harvested these inks with a combination of oil and rust filtered through water. It is weak, but it is all I have._

Tristan raised his head again and looked around, scribing some of the details as he did. He knew he was on his own here, knew he needed to use his head in order to survive and maybe, if he was lucky, get back to the life he had once led. But he still wished that Mimi were here… she made a great sounding board for ideas, and often helped him keep his thoughts in order.

He put his pen back to the paper, transferring his thoughts.

_I miss the others. I miss Mimi, and her hints, her thoughts and her congratulations on a job well done. I miss Sam, my kid sister by choice if not by blood. I can't help but worry about her, even though I know she can take care of herself. Margo, the Queen of Fairie. I had not seen much of her before the end, but I miss her as well. She was always there with a kind smile, a friendly face, and cookies. Lots and lots of cookies. _

_And Harmony. My love, my life. We were meant for each other, in some ways, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards for us. She feared betrayal at the hands of those she loved, and I was incapable of such a betrayal. We were a team, and a near perfect match. I will always miss her. _

Tears fell freely from his eyes now, blurring the still wet words on the page. His heart ached for the people he had left behind, and he wondered, not for the first time, if he might still be able to see them again.

_What I write now are the events that follow my death. In hopes that someday it will help me to sort this entire mess out or that maybe, just maybe, it will reach the hands of those I loved. _

_I woke up on the cold stone floor of an abandoned factory. Machinery was everywhere along with the heavy scent of old blood and sweat, oil and scarred metal. There were no lights, only the fading daylight in the sky outside. Now that I look back on it, I remember hearing gunfire…_

The shots sounded as though the came from a pretty decent distance, but in the shadow of twilight, the flash of a muzzle flare was pretty distinct.

"_A hundred, maybe two hundred yards away…"_ He thought to himself.

Tristan sprinted the length of the factory to look out one of the broken windows. The muzzle flashes showed him exactly where to look.

Four men chased one through the skeletal remains of what had once been a large city. The man being chased dodged this way and that, trying to find a path with which to make his escape, but from up here, Tristan could tell that it was hopeless. If he couldn't stand and fight the men, he was going to be run down and killed.

He slipped out onto the windowsill before he even realized that the decision had been made, and leapt out into the night. When he landed, his enhanced vision picked up the running man easily enough. His long black hair was a tangle of blood and sweat, and stuck to his face as he tried to make his way through the remains of the city.

He flew by Tristan without so much as a glance, running full tilt towards the abandoned factory which Tristan had just left, his scent wafting through the air like perfume.

The stink of fear pervaded it.

As soon as the man was past, Tristan dashed across the pathway in front of his four pursuers, startling them all to a halt.

All four of them raised their guns and pointed them in the direction that Tristan had just passed. "What the hell was that thing?"

The man in the back, who appeared to be the leader, spoke in a low voice to the others. "It is nothing, only a trick, something to distract us from our quarry this evening." His words seemed to relax the others, who lowered their weapons slightly. "Continue onward. That creature will not escape us this time."

Taking a deep breath, Tristan dashed across in front of them, claws flashing silver in the light of the muzzle flashes. It took only a second or two for the gun barrels to fall away, sheared about halfway up the stock by something that none of those men had ever seen before.

"Did you see that! What the hell was that beast? I've ranged through the old city for a near five years, I ain't never seen nothing like that? Look at what it did to my gun!"

Tristan was nearby, watching and listening as the men ranted and raved over their ruined weapons. They were old, he noted, rifles of some kind. Not a single shot, but certainly not much more advanced than that.

Still, a gun was a gun, and bullets hurt. He was glad that the fools had been too busy panicking to line up a real shot on him.

"…still out there?"

"I don't know!" The leader's voice was nowhere near as calm now that he knew there was a real threat near by. "Find it and kill it!"

"I shot it twice, point blank, and it never even flinched! It sliced the barrel of my gun clean in half!" The fear smell filled the area. "How the hell are we supposed to kill it without our guns?"

He smiled, a feral grin that never touched his eyes.

The men never really stood a chance.

He rushed from the darkness on silent feet. Four quick, precise strikes later, the four men lay on the ground, unconscious.

Moving quickly, so as not to spend any more time around the fallen men than necessary, I rifled through their pockets. Old habits die hard, I guess. No wallets, no identification, just a handful of extra ammunition and a couple of hunting knives.

Footsteps sounded in the background, alerting me to the presence of someone else approaching. Leaving the men where they were, I slipped behind the crumbling remains of what looked like it might once have been the corner of a stone building.

"It's not possible!"

"Of course it's possible, you fuckin moron, it's right there in front of you, plain as the nose on yer face."

Two men stood over the four unconscious men. They carried archaic weapons, a large hammer of some kind for the one, and some sort of large sword for the other.

"I told you! I saw something come out of that factory!"

"Dammit, Richter, how friggin dumb are you anyways? You think whatever the hell it was you saw comin out that factory took down four of these clowns, who was fully armed?"

"Sure, why the hell not!"

"Because you dumbass! This was obviously more than one friggin guy!"

Tristan listened intently, wondering who these two were and what their purpose in this whole adventure was to begin with.

"So what'dya think we oughta do?" The unnamed man asked.

Tristan could almost hear the man named Richter shrug, and look down at the four men. "May as well leave them here. Law's not gonna do anything about them… and I'm not looking to just flat kill 'em, ya know?"

"Yeah, I hear that."

Tristan started to ease himself forward, around the rock to get a look at the two of them, but stopped short when he heard another pair of footsteps come sprinting down from the direction of the factory.

"Jak!" The two men both cried out in greeting and stepped over the unconscious bodies.

The other man stumbled up and stopped. Tristan guessed he was leaning on the other two for support. His voice was raspy and wheezing; the long run he'd been put through obviously having its effect upon him. "…the fuck took you so long?"

"Easy, Jak. These four was down when we got here… we were trying to figure out what it was when you came back just now. Richter thinks it's something that came out of the factory."

"Out of the factory… fucking hell… what was it last time, half a dozen Rangers came flying out of there and tore what's left of this place up for a month before we could get anyone down here to take care of it?"

"Yeah." Richter again. "S'about right. What do you think we ought do, Nick?"

"Burn the freakin place to the ground for all the trouble it causes us."

A silence followed before the same man, Nick, spoke again. "I'm just joking you morons, I know the place still has valuable supplies in it, but it doesn't change the fact that too much bad shit comes out of there."

"We'll get a crew together tomorrow and go check it out." Jak said, his voice starting to recover a little bit. "In the meantime, let's get the hell out of here. Feels weird, like summins watching us."

The three men trod away towards the skeletal city, leaving Tristan to his own musings. It was a good ten minutes before they passed completely out of the range of his hearing, given the silence of the night surrounding them. Even then, he waited a few more minutes before he moved.

Trotting slowly up the path towards the old factory, he couldn't help but wonder what sort of supplies the men had been referring to. Or why things kept popping out of this particular place.

_Was it a dimensional rift that had opened once and simply never managed to close completely? Or maybe something like a nexus point, where several dimensional boundaries meet at the same point, and the walls are weakened there? I don't know enough about dimensional geography to know for certain, but I think tomorrow, I'll see what I can find… before that search party comes to shake things up again. _

**_- end chapter -_**


	2. Chapter 2

_The old brick building stood in one of the worst sections of the city. A tower four-story brownstone seemed somehow out of place, and the sign on the front advertising a used bookstore only made the image that much more surreal. _

_Madeline frowned at the face of the building once more and tugged hard on the door handle, expecting to find it closed, or hear the rattle of chains on the other side. Too many places were closing down anymore. Too few people took any pleasure in reading any longer._

_The door swung outward with barely a squeak, throwing Madeline off balance. After a moment's surprise she darted in through the dark opening, and stopped, allowing her eyes to adjust._

_The darkness receded and was replaced by a warm glow of light from overhead. She gasped as the store came into focus. It was like her own personal heaven. Miles and miles of shelves ran the length of the brownstone, with piles of books set beside them. Monstrous iron staircase wound their way around the outside of the room, ascending to even greater heights, and presumably more books. _

_And behind the counter was the old man who had told her about the place._

_"Well hello there." His words were rote, as though the greeting were something used thousands of times. "What can I help you- It's you!"_

_The young girl smiled at the expression on the kooky old man's face. He was of small stature, with a long white beard and wild hair which wouldn't have looked out of place on a wizard from some of her books. "Yeah. I told you I'd find the place."_

_"Bags, girl! I tell hundreds of people about this place, but none of them ever show up!" He leaped to his feet and came around the corner, grabbing her hands and leaping up and down. "It's been years since anyone your age has come in here. Normally its old folks who want to look important buying lots of old books for their libraries; but a young girl, who actually wants to read! This is a great day!"_

_Madeline laughed. She really liked the old man._

_"Come, come," he shouted over his shoulder, leading the way towards the stacks. "I'll send you home with your arms so full of books that you'll need a year to read them all!"_

_Madeline followed the old man closely, burdened all of a sudden by an intense fear of becoming lost among the stacks and never found again. She needn't have worried though, the old man, whose name was Zedd, trotted along at the pace of a man much younger than his apparent years, stopping here and there to point out an especially rare book, or some nifty author or another._

_"Zedd," Her voice was nervous, brittle, and far too loud in such a place. "Have you read all of these books?! There must be millions of them!"_

_Zedd stopped and looked at her as he swiveled around, his lean frame filling up much of the space between the shelves. "The last one is on my desk, I was reading it as you came in," He followed the words with a smile and sly wink. "How old are you, Madeline?"_

_"Fourteen."_

_"I've been running this bookstore since before your parents were born. For nearly fifty years, I've lived among these shelves, sheltered by the experiences of other people's characters, and other people's thoughts." He paused "I am familiar with every book in this building… I know who it was written by, and what the basic story is about, but in response to your question no, I have not read them all. It would take hundreds of years to even think of accomplishing such a feat."_

_"Oh.Okay" She dropped her head, a little ashamed that she hadn't thought of how long it would take to read so many books._

_Zedd chucked her under the chin with his long bony fingers. "Come on, kiddo, the ones you asked me about the other day are back here."_

_Madeline beamed a bright smile at him. "You remembered!?"_

_"Yes, ma'am. Of course, I did."_

_He led her further into the building, and up one of the cool iron staircases, following its spiral curve around a column of some kind of stone._

_"Did you know that these staircases were built originally as a way to help defend castles, little one?"_

_"Really?" Madeline thought about it for a minute. "Did it make it easier for the soldiers to push people down them or something?"_

_Zedd laughed, the sound echoing up through the stacks of books. "No, no, nothing like that. You see… most swordsmen at the time were right handed. When they came up the stairs, their sword arms were against this middle column." He thumped the stone with his hand for good measure. "The men above them though were also right handed, and thus had their arms free to fight." Zedd made a grand gesture with his arm, complete with the sound effects as he sword fought with an imaginary foe. "Made it so that the men on the top would have the best advantage."_

_"Nifty."_

_"Ah, here we are." He threw his arms wide indicating an alcove of shelves nearly three times his own height. "Native American Folklore. One of the more interesting topics that I've come across in recent years. There was so much history to these people." His voice took on a reverent tone with a note of sadness. "We destroyed so much when we came to this land… we know only a fraction now of what we might have known if we had shared our land with them, rather than trying to claim what they already lived upon."_

_"Aww… don't be sad, Zedd. You weren't there, you didn't force them away, and you know, you can't change the past."_

_"You know, you're pretty bright, kiddo. Where'd you get so smart."_

_"Reading."_

_The old man laughed again, an uproarious sound, cantering through the books, loud enough that Madeline felt a little uncomfortable with her own joke. _

_"Clever girl. Anyways, I'll leave you to look through the books here. I'll be just a few shelves away, dusting off some of King Arthur's books."_

_Madeline was already absorbed in the books on the shelf by the time the comment registered. "Wait, what do you mean, King Arthur's books. King Arthur is the character in the book!"_

_Zedd's voice drifted up from far away, out of her sight. "The books belong to the characters within them, little one. The stories they tell, the lessons they teach. They belong to them."_

_Madeline nodded, not quite understanding what he meant, and then returned quietly to the books around her._

_Titles leapt out at her, catching her attention. _Spirit of the Wild. Black-Elk Speaks. Of Wolf and Man. _There were hundreds that she wanted to take with her. They called to her. _Cherokee Medicine. Inuit Legends and Myths._ There were too many to choose from. _

_That's when she saw it. _

_The book was on a shelf far above her head. It was bound in simple, unmarked leather, tied off with another scrip of the same material. _

_"Zedd!"_

_The old man appeared as if from nowhere next to her, his eyes wide. "Good heavens above girl, I thought something had happened to you! Don't do that!"_

_"Sorry." Her sheepishness passed almost instantly as she fixated upon the book in question. "What's that book up there?" She strained against gravity attempting with her pointed finger, to draw herself up to it._

_Zedd squinted and focused his eyes upon the leather bound volume in question. "Well, I'll be damned."_

_"Zedd! Don't curse. Now what is it?"_

_"A book, little one-"_

_"Well, duh!"_

_Zedd shushed her with a wave of his hand. "It's a book that I thought we had lost long ago." He began slowly climbing one of the leaning ladders, sending a cascade of dust down over the lower shelves. "I lost track of this volume nearly twenty years ago. What it's doing in this section, I have no idea. It's a handwritten journal, reputed to have been written by a dead man."_

_"How would a dead man write a book? That seems kind of silly to me."_

_"Shush, child, you must understand that in the old days there were men of great power. Men and women who could manipulate the forces of the world with merely an effort of will. In such a world, does it seem so strange that a dead man could, and would, write a book?"_

_Madeline thought about it for a moment as Zedd continued his journey up the ladder. Dust was raining down from everywhere now, as he grabbed hold of the leather and began to pull. After a brief flash of brilliance, she backed away from the bookshelf and the tottering old man._

_With a cry of triumph, Zedd pulled the book loose of its moorings and nearly toppled from the ladder._

_"On Life After Death…" He chirped to himself as he climbed carefully back down. "Interesting reading material… not for the faint of heart, I think." _

_At the bottom of the ladder, he held out his hand, displaying a leather portfolio, filled nearly to overflowing with unbound handwritten pages. The unit was worn, the leather soft and supple, like velvet. Desire seized hold of Madeline and she reached out her hand to touch the material._

_Zedd stepped back pulling the book with him. "Are you sure you want to read this, little one? Some books are not to be opened with impunity."_

_"Zedd." She tapped her foot as she leveled a flat stare at him. "You wouldn't have gotten it down from there if you hadn't wanted me to read the book, what's with the lecture?"_

_"This book… it is not something to be taken lightly." He shook it gently, and turned it over. Pause. "On the other hand, if you noticed it… I think you're supposed to read it. I just want you to be sure of what you're getting yourself into young one. Maybe wait a few years?"_

_"Come on, it can't be that bad. Let me see it."_

_The old man held his hands out and surrendered the book with a sigh. For a split second, his hair whipped around him and framing his lean body with an ancient dignity, as it the whole world had sighed along with him._

_"It's yours, kiddo. Just be careful what you do with it, alright?" _

_Madeline looked up at him, her eyes bright with tears of happiness. She opened her mouth twice to try and thank the old man, but the words just wouldn't come out. No one had ever given her a book before… especially not one this important._

_"Go on," his voice was softer now, and his expression one of a loving grandfather. "Run along with that, and don't forget to come and visit a tottering old fool in the future."_

_Madeline smiled as she headed back to the front door. "But… Zedd, where would I find one of those?"_

_He smiled again. "You're a good kid, Madeline. Take care."_

_Madeline trotted out of the store, clutching the portfolio of pages to her chest as if it contained all the treasures of the world. _

_She never heard the door lock behind her._

_Some hours later, Madeline walked up the driveway to her family's home. Neither her mother nor father would be home for many hours yet, so she proceeded into the house and dropped the portfolio on the kitchen table as she made herself a cup of noodles._

_Noodles in hand she did a quick check of the locks on the doors, making sure all of them were in place, and then proceeded upstairs to her bedroom. Throwing on a pair of loose fitting sweats, she lay down on her bed, noodles in one hand, and began to sort through the free floating pages in front of her._

_Neatly printed dates and times in the upper corner of each entry made her job easier. For nearly three-quarters of an hour Madeline combined, shuffled and stacked the papers, maneuvering herself around the bed in order to keep them in a rough chronological order. Some days had several entries, and at other points there were weeks, even entire months missing from the timeline. All in all she guessed that it covered a period of roughly seven years worth of entries. Some of the pages were worn and cracked with age, others yellowed and barely readable, but even with, or perhaps in spite of these facts, Madeline could hardly believe that such a treasure had come into her possession._

_When the task was finally finished, Madeline hefted the first set worth of papers and settled back against her bed pillows. _

On Life After Death

Tristan Olivera

_Madeline set the last of her noodles aside, and wrapped a blanket about her waist and shoulders as a chill descended on the room. She checked the clock by her bedside, and prepared herself to dive into a world which had long since passed her by._

- CHAPTER END -

_My name is Tristan Olivera. _

_I died on July 23rd, 2005._

_What follows, is a recounting, as best I can remember, of the events following my death. But first, there is something that I need to say._

_To my dearest friends and loved ones. _

_Sam._

_Mimi._

_Margo._

_Harmony._

_I love you all._

_Please forgive me._

_In the beginning, I could still hear the sounds._

_The sound of a young woman, crying, begging and pleading for her brother to come back to her._

_The sound of someone screaming her heart out, venting her fury at the world. A fury so strong that the world quivered and trembled at her wrath._

_The sound of a queen, somewhere far away, weeping on her throne at the unfairness of it all. At the pain of trading one loss for another._

_And then, even that was taken from me as I fell through the never-ending blackness._

_It was some time later that I noticed the wind and the noise below me. Time passed again, though whether it was an instant or an eternity, I couldn't tell. Then all of a sudden I found myself plunged into an icy cold river. There was nothing but blackness above or below the surface, and I could feel it carrying him, further into whatever nightmare this darkness embodied. _

_Part of me wondered if it would really be so bad, to give in and let the waters carry me beyond the blackness to a better place. Surely there would be a better place for me… and I was so very tired of fighting. It would be nice to stop fighting._

_Yet something inside of me raged at the idea. I could feel my blood boiling and my hands moving of their own accord, dragging along the bottom of the cold river until finally they caught upon something solid enough to hold me against the onslaught of running water. Rational thought was thrown out the window as fury took over and I began to fight harder and harder against the current._

_Inch by inch I dragged myself along the river bottom, water flowing all around, begging me, beckoning me to give in to its sweet, sweet voice. When that failed, it began to threaten me, but the words were empty and there was no turning back now. The cold faded away to nothingness, the water ceased to be anything more than an annoyance, and soon I felt it. _

_In the distance, far beyond the range of my normal senses, there was a light in the blackness. There was something there; a place where he could escape both the river and the blackness that plagued me so. _

_I let loose a roar of fury as the river redoubled its efforts to push me back. I shoved my face back under the water and dug my hands in, following the river bottom straight towards my escape. _

_Towards life._

- CHAPTER END -

_First Entry_

_Date and Time Unknown_

_At some point over the last few days, I made a conscious decision to write all of this down. It seems unbelievable, even to me, who spent the last few years of my life living amongst the most extraordinary people in the world. _

Tristan looked down at the sheet of loose paper in front of him, and at the thick, black furred hands that scribed his thoughts upon it. How long had it been that he thought that this body of his was gone for good?

_Though I don't yet understand the nature of this place, I can sense that in some ways it is similar to the world that I am used to. Time seems to flow in roughly the same fashion, and measurements appear to be roughly equivalent, though I've had no one to confirm or deny these suspicions for me. It seems once more, I am all alone. _

Visions flashed before his eyes of the fight that had sprung up during the last danger room scenario. Too many people were hurt and that **thing**, whatever it was, just didn't seem to taking enough damage. The scene took over his mind's eye and he found himself forced to watch Mimi fall to her knees, hit by a blast from its midsection.

He reached for the pen but his hands shook too much and his eyes wouldn't focus well enough. He knocked it to the floor.

The air rushed by him as he charged the Apocalypse-creature. A roar of fury chased all fear from his heart as he leapt at the thing, claws extended to tear that light spewing mid-section to pieces.

And then it had opened.

After that there was the blackness, and then the wires were everywhere. It was like he had blinked and they had all suddenly materialized in front of him. In some small part of his brain, Tristan realized that they were part of its core; something that could cause it true and undeniable pain.

Another roar ripped through his lungs and out into the negative space as he began to rip and tear at the wires. He poured every last ounce of energy into destroying everything in sight.

Right before the blackness reclaimed him, Tristan heard the creature roar in pain.

His last thought echoed throughout the dark.

"Good."

When Tristan's eyesight cleared he found himself lying with his head upon the side of the overturned paper roller that he had been using as a desk, his fur sticky with the ink he had spilled. Cursing, he sat up and right the bottle quickly, thankful that he had lost only half of its contents due to his clumsiness.

_To experience your own death… and to find yourself on the other side, still able to remember it, seems very strange to me. I can not believe that this lonely, desolate landscape is Heaven, nor am I willing to accept that the grace of my actions has landed my within the pits of Hell, and so I am forced to pursue another answer. _

_This is the point where Cassidy would tell me to use my brain, and the gifted senses that I'd been born with, which is what I have been trying to do. The place I woke up seems to be an old abandoned factory. I harvested these inks with a combination of oil and rust filtered through water. It is weak, but it is all I have._

Tristan raised his head again and looked around, scribing some of the details as he did. He knew he was on his own here, knew he needed to use his head in order to survive and maybe, if he was lucky, get back to the life he had once led. But he still wished that Mimi were here… she made a great sounding board for ideas, and often helped him keep his thoughts in order.

He put his pen back to the paper, transferring his thoughts.

_I miss the others. I miss Mimi, and her hints, her thoughts and her congratulations on a job well done. I miss Sam, my kid sister by choice if not by blood. I can't help but worry about her, even though I know she can take care of herself. Margo, the Queen of Fairie. I had not seen much of her before the end, but I miss her as well. She was always there with a kind smile, a friendly face, and cookies. Lots and lots of cookies. _

_And Harmony. My love, my life. We were meant for each other, in some ways, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards for us. She feared betrayal at the hands of those she loved, and I was incapable of such a betrayal. We were a team, and a near perfect match. I will always miss her. _

Tears fell freely from his eyes now, blurring the still wet words on the page. His heart ached for the people he had left behind, and he wondered, not for the first time, if he might still be able to see them again.

_What I write now are the events that follow my death. In hopes that someday it will help me to sort this entire mess out or that maybe, just maybe, it will reach the hands of those I loved. _

_I woke up on the cold stone floor of an abandoned factory. Machinery was everywhere along with the heavy scent of old blood and sweat, oil and scarred metal. There were no lights, only the fading daylight in the sky outside. Now that I look back on it, I remember hearing gunfire… _

The shots sounded as though the came from a pretty decent distance, but in the shadow of twilight, the flash of a muzzle flare was pretty distinct.

"_A hundred, maybe two hundred yards away…"_ He thought to himself.

Tristan sprinted the length of the factory to look out one of the broken windows. The muzzle flashes showed him exactly where to look.

Four men chased one through the skeletal remains of what had once been a large city. The man being chased dodged this way and that, trying to find a path with which to make his escape, but from up here, Tristan could tell that it was hopeless. If he couldn't stand and fight the men, he was going to be run down and killed.

He slipped out onto the windowsill before he even realized that the decision had been made, and leapt out into the night. When he landed, his enhanced vision picked up the running man easily enough. His long black hair was a tangle of blood and sweat, and stuck to his face as he tried to make his way through the remains of the city.

He flew by Tristan without so much as a glance, running full tilt towards the abandoned factory which Tristan had just left, his scent wafting through the air like perfume.

The stink of fear pervaded it.

As soon as the man was past, Tristan dashed across the pathway in front of his four pursuers, startling them all to a halt.

All four of them raised their guns and pointed them in the direction that Tristan had just passed. "What the hell was that thing!?"

The man in the back, who appeared to be the leader, spoke in a low voice to the others. "It is nothing, only a trick, something to distract us from our quarry this evening." His words seemed to relax the others, who lowered their weapons slightly. "Continue onward. That creature will not escape us this time."

Taking a deep breath, Tristan dashed across in front of them, claws flashing silver in the light of the muzzle flashes. It took only a second or two for the gun barrels to fall away, sheared about halfway up the stock by something that none of those men had ever seen before.

"Did you see that?! What the hell was that beast? I've ranged through the old city for a near five years, I ain't never seen nothing like that? Look at what it did to my gun!"

Tristan was nearby, watching and listening as the men ranted and raved over their ruined weapons. They were old, he noted, rifles of some kind. Not a single shot, but certainly not much more advanced than that.

Still, a gun was a gun, and bullets hurt. He was glad that the fools had been too busy panicking to line up a real shot on him.

"…still out there?"

"I don't know!" The leader's voice was nowhere near as calm now that he knew there was a real threat near by. "Find it and kill it!"

"I shot it twice, point blank, and it never even flinched! It sliced the barrel of my gun clean in half!" The fear smell filled the area. "How the hell are we supposed to kill it without our guns!?"

He smiled, a feral grin that never touched his eyes.

The men never really stood a chance.

He rushed from the darkness on silent feet. Four quick, precise strikes later, the four men lay on the ground, unconscious.

Moving quickly, so as not to spend any more time around the fallen men than necessary, he rifled through their pockets. Old habits die hard. No wallets, no identification, just a handful of extra ammunition and a couple of hunting knives.

Footsteps sounded in the background, alerting me to the presence of someone else approaching. Leaving the men where they were, I slipped behind the crumbling remains of what looked like it might once have been the corner of a stone building.

"It's not possible!"

"Of course it's possible, you fuckin moron, it's right there in front of you, plain as the nose on yer face."

Two men stood over the four unconscious men. They carried archaic weapons, a large hammer of some kind for the one, and some sort of large sword for the other.

"I told you! I saw something come out of that factory!"

"Dammit, Richter, how friggin dumb are you anyways? You think whatever the hell it was you saw comin out that factory took down four of these clowns, who was fully armed?"

"Sure, why the hell not?!"

"Because you dumbass! This was obviously more than one friggin guy!"

Tristan listened intently, wondering who these two were and what their purpose in this whole adventure was to begin with.

"So what'dya think we oughta do?" The unnamed man asked.

Tristan could almost hear the man named Richter shrug, and look down at the four men. "May as well leave them here. Law's not gonna do anything about them… and I'm not looking to just flat kill 'em, ya know?"

"Yeah, I hear that."

Tristan started to ease himself forward, around the rock to get a look at the two of them, but stopped short when he heard another pair of footsteps come sprinting down from the direction of the factory.

"Jak!" The two men both cried out in greeting and stepped over the unconscious bodies.

The other man stumbled up and stopped. Tristan guessed he was leaning on the other two for support. His voice was raspy and wheezing; the long run he'd been put through obviously having its effect upon him. "…the fuck took you so long?"

"Easy, Jak. These four was down when we got here… we were trying to figure out what it was when you came back just now. Richter thinks it's something that came out of the factory."

"Out of the factory… fucking hell… what was it last time, half a dozen Beasts came flying out of there and tore what's left of this place up for a month before we could get anyone down here to take care of it?"

"Yeah." Richter again. "S'about right. What do you think we ought do, Nick?"

"Burn the freakin place to the ground for all the trouble it causes us."

A silence followed before the same man, Nick, spoke again. "I'm just joking you morons, I know the place still has valuable supplies in it, but it doesn't change the fact that too much bad shit comes out of there."

"We'll get a crew together tomorrow and go check it out." Jak said, his voice starting to recover a little bit. "In the meantime, let's get the hell out of here. Feels weird, like summins watching us."

The three men trod away towards the skeletal city, leaving Tristan to his own musings. It was a good ten minutes before they passed completely out of the range of his hearing, given the silence of the night surrounding them. Even then, he waited a few more minutes before he moved.

Trotting slowly up the path towards the old factory, he couldn't help but wonder what sort of supplies the men had been referring to. Or why things kept popping out of this particular place.

_Was it a dimensional rift that had opened once and simply never managed to close completely? Or maybe something like a nexus point, where several dimensional boundaries meet at the same point, and the walls are weakened there? I don't know enough about dimensional geography to know for certain, but I think tomorrow, I'll see what I can find… before that search party comes to shake things up again. _

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 24??_

_Location: Remnants of New York City_

_The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's a terrible cliché, but I've discover something. The reason that clichés have been around for so long is because they are almost infallibly true. _

_Though I have discovered a bit more of the nature of this place, I am still incapable of a full explanation. Let me start at the beginning though. It's been about three and a half days since the last entry._

_The day after dealing with those four idiots, I found myself waking up with the dawn. Let me tell you, after the coldness of the River, and the chill of the night before, there was little that could have felt better than waking up with the sun on my face…_

Sitting back with his feet up on the stool in front of him, Tristan looked back on the events of the past few days. Sadness tinged his features as he fought for control of his emotions.

The day after he'd dealt with those four jokers down near the city, he'd woken up warm, and happy. For a moment he'd forgotten all about the fight with Apocalypse, he'd forgotten his own death, and thought for just a split second that he was laying in the hammock that he'd hung up with his roommate Sean. He'd believed for just the briefest of moments that he was back at school.

Until he'd tried to get out of the same hammock and nearly stumbled into the concrete walls of the abandoned factory that he'd slept in.

Looking back now, he had to laugh. For a man as graceful as he was, the image of himself stumbling around the room trying to get his bearings was damned funny.

Eventually though, he'd regained his balance and sense of place.

"Shit. I'd hoped this whole thing was a bad dream."

Moving over to the window, he'd let the sun beat upon him, warming his fur and his insides with its light as he gazed out upon the skeletal remains of the city in front of him.

With the sun up, Tristan could see for miles. Huge sections of the city lay in rubble. Streets had caved in and been overgrown by plants springing up through the cracked pavement. He could even see a spot where a massive tree had grown up almost in the middle of a major intersection.

The ruined remains of skyscrapers decorated the skyline itself. Iron girders without walls or windows made the whole thing look more than a little surreal.

It wasn't until he spotted the firehouse that it clicked.

FDNY 324.

This was New York. Or at the very least, the remains of New York.

"What the hell happened to this place?" The question was whispered to no one in particular, but it hung heavy in the air regardless.

Shocked and more than a little unnerved by the revelation, he decided to go through the same morning routine he had every morning since he was 16.

He stretched his muscles out, feeling like they should be a little more stiff after his death, and began to slowly but surely make his way through the martial arts _kata _that he'd been taught to use for mental focus and relaxation.

Surprisingly it worked quite well. After no more than a few minutes of the rhythmic movements, Tristan began to feel his senses sharpening, his mind becoming more awake and alert, and his body beginning to respond more quickly to the demands that he made upon it. Soon he was plowing through the _kata _with superhuman speed and accuracy, the tension leaking out of his muscles bit by bit as he pushed himself harder and harder.

"So do you think Nick really saw something in here last night? Or was he just covering his ass for not chasing after the guys who were running Jak down?"

The words drifted up through his consciousness and brought his movements to a sudden and complete stop. Warmed by the sun and the strength of his exertions, Tristan moved quickly, slipping around the corner into a room full of broken down machinery.

A few seconds later, two men entered the room. One man spoke with a heavy accent, that Tristan recognized only vaguely as something European.

"No idea, really… Bryce wanted us to come up here and see. Make sure the supplies are all in order, make sure that nothing's come through from somewhere else again."

As he watched, the two men moved towards a door that Tristan hadn't noticed before. It was partially hidden behind a pile of machinery and from his angle, was nearly invisible. If it hadn't been for the two men walking straight towards it, he doubted he would even have noticed.

Pulling a key from a leather cord around his neck, the European man fitted it to the lock and shouldered the door open. The whole frame shuddered under the assault, and the door creaked open with sounds of disuse that were enough to make Tristan wince in pain.

"Hey, give me some light, will ya?"

"Sure thing." A light flared in the darkness of the room beyond the door.

"What the hell… this place hasn't been touched. Everything just like we left it last time."

"What does that mean, Leon?" This time the voice came from the other man. "There's something here, we saw the footprint right next to the gateway, where it came out. Same prints that were on the ground by the four lawmen. Same prints that were all over the other room in here."

"Yeah, but you've got to look at the other information." His accent was heavier now, coming out in a slight slur as his partner pressed him for information. "Think about what we saw in the other room. Someone or something very intelligent is here. It _made _ink! Out of motor oil and rust. It can write, and obviously read, which is more than most can say. It keeps a journal! And claims to have died a long ass time ago. Add that all up and we could have a very big problem on our hands"

"Yeah, some sort of living dead monstrosity."

Tristan slid towards the doorway and peered around the edge. His shock nearly gave him away as he slid down the wall. The man who had just spoken was a mutant… he was holding a ball of fire in his hand and using it for a torch.

The other man turned towards him, his face cast in sharp relief by the shadows. "Not sure, really… we should get back to Bryce and report."

"You're not leaving so soon, are you?"

Tristan's voice echoed around the room when he spoke, the darkness carrying it away from him. The two men whipped their heads around, trying to follow the echo back to its source.

"Who's there!?" The European man drew the rapier, which crackled like a stun baton as electric energy filled ran down its length.

Christ. They were both mutants. He sighed inwardly and edged deeper into the shadows.

"Lord on high, you're him aren't you! You're Tristan, the guy from the journal! Come out into the light so we can see you!"

Cursing himself inwardly for leaving the damned thing out, Tristan moved a little closer to the light. The man's voice was panicked and he didn't want to shock them too badly. The fire in the man's hand leapt up towards the ceiling, creating a ring of fire that covered the room with a soft candle light.

Both men jumped as Tristan came into view. He could see what they saw, through his mind's eye. A monstrous bi-pedal black dog, stepping out of the shadows, looming over both men like some sort of Death god from the age of antiquities. Their reactions weren't particularly surprising.

"Whoa… easy fellas."

"You're… you're…"

Tristan nodded, slowly, letting them adjust to his appearance. "Yeah, I am. What of it? You're standing there holding a ball of fire. Who're you to throw stones?"

"You look… alive. How're you still alive? You're journal says you died four hundred years ago!"

If his fur hadn't been black, Tristan was certain that he would've gone pale. "Four hundred years! You're telling me that four hundred years have passed since I died? SHIT!"

Turning he raked his claws along the wall, scarring the concrete and sending dust cascading down to the floor.

Slowly, the two men lowered their arms and weapons and moved a little closer to him. Undoubtedly they could hear the rapid fire string of invectives coming from his mouth.

"I'd thought to have landed in a different dimension, not the fucking future!" He growled, the sound low and menacing, sending each of the two men back a step. "What the hell happened to this place?"

The two looked at each other, faces pale in the firelight. They smelled hesitant and fearful. "We're not entirely sure."

"YOU'RE WHAT!" Tristan rounded on them, roaring at the top of his lungs as he advanced on the little man with the fireball in his hands. Quick details lodged themselves in his mind as he moved. The man was about six feet tall and weighed maybe 175 pounds. He was slightly underfed and looked like he was about to soil himself. He had blonde hair, shining out underneath the layer of dust, and a young face.

"We're not sure!" The words tumbled out of his mouth, like water from the sky on a rainy day. "No one knows! There's rumors, some rumors, about what happened. Virus, War, Nuclear Attack, all sorts of shit like that, but no one knows!"

Backed all the way to the wall by now, the man stopped moving and cowered slightly. Tristan screamed in frustration and rounded on the other one. He was watching the entire exchange calmly, having raised his sword again just in case he was attacked.

"Don't look at me, in my country, we do not know any more than the stupid Americans."

"Who the hell are you people, anyways? You're not the guys I saw last night."

"I'm Leon." The European said, and then gestured with his sword. "And that, is Edmund. He's a good guy, when you're not terrorizing him."

Looking back over his shoulder at the frightened Edmund, Tristan looked a little sheepish. He held his hand out towards the man, "Sorry man, lost my cool for a minute there, it's been kind of a long day."

Looking back and forth between Tristan's face and his hand the man finally took hold and hauled himself up. "No worries, you just caught me a little off guard…"

The two men stood side by side, looking at Tristan as though he were a fascinating yet dangerous specimen. "Will you excuse us for a moment?"

Tristan nodded, knowing that no matter where they went he'd be able to hear them.

"What should we do with him, Ed?" Leon spoke in a low whisper, clearly trying to disguise the nature of their conversation.

Edmund shrugged. "We can't just leave him up here, sooner or later the Rangers will find out and send a team out here. They'll stir up trouble one way or the other. Maybe we should just take him to see Bryce?"

"Oh yeah, Bryce will love that! He'll be thrilled to have a reason for his arrest to get brought right into his office."

"You got any better ideas?"

"Umm… no, not really. Looks like Bryce is gonna have a bad day too." Leon smiled as he said it. "I do so love giving that man grief."

The two turned back towards Tristan and started walking towards the door. "Why don't you come with us, eh? We'll take you to meet our boss and see if we can't figure out a little bit of what's been going on." Leon spoke with a casual air now, his weapon once more at his side. "Edmund's going to pop over and tell him that we're coming, that way the big man isn't too shocked when we show up."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Whatever you want, man. This is your show for the moment."

Edmund nodded his head and said a brief goodbye before disappearing in a cloud of fire and smoke. Leon looked over to Tristan as he started laughing hysterically.

"What's so funny, man?"

"Nothing… really…" Tristan tried in vain to catch his breath. "I used to know a guy who could do that. Just like that, actually…"

Leon nodded, still looking at him askance. "Well, save your breath, boyo, we got a bit of walking to do."

When they arrived at their destination, Tristan nearly started laughing again. He only just managed to restrain himself as they approached the massive steel and concrete structure that had been the Meadowlands Stadium.

"This is your boss' place? He runs a salvage yard out of the old football stadium?"

On the way over, Leon had explained a little bit about the way things worked in today's version of New York. Salvage was the business to be in. People were willing to trade big for some of the relics from before the Change, as he called it.

So, he and Edmund, along with the guys I'd seen the night before, worked in a salvage yard, for a guy named Bryce. They got a place to stay, and food, in return for working some of the guy's more dangerous runs.

"Yeah, this is the place. Guess, in the old days he would've been a fan or something. Come on, I'll show you in."

He led Tristan in through the main gates, using another key on the leather cord to open the padlock there and then proceeded up the stairs towards the VIP boxes.

"This is the place." He said, stopping outside of the only door whose room had a light on. "Come on in…"

He held open the door and ushered Tristan inside.

The guy sitting behind the battered old metal desk was an enormous black man. Not muscular, but fat. He might've been near Tristan's height, at six and a half feet tall, but must have weighed in at over six hundred pounds. The chair he sat in looked like it was literally overflowing.

"You must be the guy's caused a ruckus all over da city, ya?"

Tristan grabbed one of the metal chairs from the side of the room and spun it around, straddling it. "Yeah, probably. The way Leon tells it, you guys have a penchant for hunting down the mutants who look like I do."

Bryce glared past Tristan to Leon, who took a step back and had the good grace to look somewhat sheepish about the whole thing. "What? It's not like it's a lie, boss…"

The big man shook his head. "Leon's an idiot… don'tchyou go listenin to much o what he says, awright? S'true that the Rangers are a bunch a bastards that'll huntcha soon as look atchya, but they're the only ones… really."

Tristan nodded, trying to decipher the man's speech. "I'm not too worried about your Rangers, I've dealt with worse than them before… Your boys wanted me to come and meet you. Me…" He shrugged. "I've got things to take care of… though maybe you can help me?"

Bryce leaned forward eyes gleaming. "Maybe, what're you looking for?"

"Have you ever heard of the Morlocks?"

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 24??_

_Location: Remnants of New York City _

_Entry Continued_

"Never heard of 'em"

He was lying, and Tristan knew it. He could see it, in the quick glances that the fat man cast around the room, smell it in the fear stink that rose up from him in waves, and hear it in the warbling of his voice.

The fat fuck was lying, and Tristan told him so.

"Bullshit! You arrogant little cockroach! You think you can walk into my office and start telling me how things go!?"

He started to reach under the desk, for a shotgun he kept secured for just such an occasion, but he had a lot of mass to move, and Tristan was more than a little bit faster than he was.

Leaping out of the chair and across the desk, Tristan carried the metal seat with him. In a blink, he'd knocked Bryce flat onto his back and positioned the chair with its rails firmly across the man's windpipe.

"Bryce!" The shout came in stereo from Leon and Edmund, who were only know realizing that Tristan had moved.

"Whoa there boys!" Tristan called, leaning forward on the chair a little. "Me and Bryce, we're just going to sit here and have a talk, aren't we Bryce?"

There was a gurgled response from underneath the rail of the chair.

"That's what I thought." Tristan flashed his claws at the two men standing on the other side. "You two stay right where the hell you are… I'd rather not have to carve up everyone in this room just to find out why your boss was lying to me."

Edmund froze, eyeing the claws, then the small ball of fire that had blossomed in his hand, obviously contemplating which of the two was faster.

The decision was obvious when he lowered his hands and stepped back.

"Gooooood lackey…"

Leaning the chair back a hair, Tristan listened while Bryce gasped for air, trying to move his hands from where they were pinned to claw at his throat.

"Now, Bryce… buddy."

_Suffice to say that the negotiations were sped along by my rather strenuous methods of persuasion, but the truth of that matter is, what have I got to lose? _

_Everyone's gone. There's no one left to protect, and nothing left to fight for. All I have now is my search for answers. Answers that Bryce seemed to want to withhold from me. I rapidly found my patience running dry, and my ends justifying more and more extreme means. _

_Thankfully, bringing him around to my particular way of thinking didn't take so long that it killed him. He'd heard of the Morlocks through a contact in a group that they call the Rangers. Seems kind of like a more aggressive form of Wide Awake or Purity or something. They target mutants with different physical appearances mostly, since they don't have any kind of scanners to work with. _

_And from what Leon and Edmund told me later, they're rather vehement about it. Surrender and be used for research, or fight and be executed on the spot. _

_Lovely people. Just the sort of thing I want to deal with on top of all the rest of this crap. Wide Awake wannabees. _

_On the plus side though. No one seemed to know where the Morlocks were… or where they came from. That meant that even after four hundred years, the people of New York had never bothered to look beneath their feet…_

Night had fallen by the time Tristan found his way into the area which had once been Manhattan. Though he had seen a few people scurrying about in the dusk looking for shelter, none of them had so much as spoken a word in his direction. Not surprising, really, after what he'd been told.

The Rangers were likely going to come looking for him soon… and no one else wanted to get caught in the crossfire.

Making his way down the remains of 5th Avenue, he reflected briefly on his last visit to these parts. It had been maybe a month before the Apocalypse conflict began in earnest, and he'd been heading for the exact same place.

Caliban, at the time, the leader of the Morlocks. Over the course of several months, he'd been helping Tristan and some of his friends run down the source of a new drug in the New York market, a performance enhancer for mutants called Kick.

Though it was impossible to get off the streets entirely, they'd put a massive dent in the amount that was able to come through.

Tristan paused now, looking around. The ruined remains of 5th Avenue's prized shopping district rose up around him. Iron girders stood haphazardly here and there; the remains of the once famous district. Most everything else was laying in the street. Crumbled brick and concrete, worn away by hundreds of years of wind and weather, support beams rusted almost cleanly through.

It was a sad sight.

It took him nearly half the night to find what he was looking for underneath the rubble. He'd been forced to cut down through the rubble, bit by bit, until he was standing on the level of the old street, and then from there, cut more slowly and dig deeper into the ground until he found what he was looking for.

The manhole cover made a curious groaning sound as Tristan removed it. The stench that rose up from beneath was enough to make a normal man groan and his stomach turn. For someone with as sensitive a nose as he possessed, it was like opening up a mass grave.

Putting the fortitude of his stomach to the ultimate test, Tristan dropped down into the darkened sewers.

In the old days, he carried a flashlight with him for just such purposes, but now all he had was the old Zippo lighter that he'd stolen from Bryce during their altercation. Remarkably the thing still worked. With a little light on his side, Tristan was able to see part of the cause for the smell. Water which would previously have run through the sewers was sitting stagnant, and looked thick enough to walk on.

Leaping lightly across, Tristan made his way towards the first intersection, which was about twenty feet up the tunnel. This was the point where his plan would be made or broken, and he held his breath as he scrubbed lightly at the dirt on the walls with the back of his hand.

Black fur turned brown, and soon a broad smile lit Tristan's face for the first time in days.

A blue mark, hidden amongst the dirt on the walls, told him that the Morlocks were in fact still down here, and more importantly, that this was friendly territory.

Breaking out at a trot, Tristan stopped only when he came to an intersection. Each time, he found the same thing, though in places, there were two marks, one green, one blue. Sometimes they covered each other, sometimes they were next to each other, or had arrows pointing in opposite directions.

It took hours. The Morlock tunnels were impressively sized. And the deeper Tristan went into the underground city, the cleaner things became.

Pausing to check the marks against the map he'd been making in his journal, Tristan froze.

Some thing was coming up in the water behind him.

"Sssssssoo, whatsss thisss?"

Tristan turned to face the owner of this hissing voice and started. The creature looked like a man… at least, in the rudimentary facial features. His nose was flat, and slitted, and his face far too narrow, but if you could get past the phosphorescent blue of the thing's skin it's face was vaguely human.

Of course, his body was a different story. It curled around on itself like a cobra's and he swayed back and forth with an easy rhythm, moving to a music that only he could here.

"Sssssssooo, who are you, boy?"

It's tongue flicked out, tasting the air. Tristan froze, debating on explaining himself or simply attacking the creature right then and there. It didn't look like anyone that Tristan remembered, though that wasn't saying much, but there was something about it's motions that spoke of violence.

"Name's Tristan. What of it, Snakeboy?"

A hood flared out behind the creature's head only a split second before it struck. Teeth flashed in the dim light of the fire and Tristan stepped aside at the last possible second, dodging across to the open walkway on the other side of the tunnel.

"Whoa, hang on there a second, boy. I'm looking for those who live on this side of the tunnels!"

A shriek of fury came from behind the slitted red eyes as it came barreling towards him again.

Shit. Wrong answer.

Tristan cursed as he dropped the lighter, and leaped high into the air, digging his claws into the roof of the runnel for purchase as the thing went underneath him.

Dropping silently unto the walkway again, Tristan waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Snakeboy waited off to one side, forked tongue flitting this way and that as he sought his pray in the darkness.

Stealing back to the other side, his furred feet silent on the stone, Tristan crept up behind the creature and rested his claws lightly against its throat.

"Easy now, Snakeboy." He said, pulling a little tighter against it. "Don't move and just answer my questions, understand?"

The creature hissed at him in response, the sound filled with the threat of violence.

"Are you a part of a raiding party? Or are you a resident on this side?"

"Fuck you, Topsssssider."

"Look. Patience isn't high on my list of virtues today, and you're trying what little I have left. Now either you give me the answer to my questions, or I will slit your throat and dump you into that nasty ass water to bleed out."

Maybe it was the tone in his voice, or maybe the snake thing just didn't like the idea of getting dumped in the remains of four hundred year old sewage, but his body slumped a little as he spoke.

"Raiding party."

"Okay, good. Now we're getting somewhere. If you've gotten in this far, you must have a pretty good idea of where you're going, right?"

It's little red eyes went wide with understanding. "You want me to take you there?"

"Yup. If you do, you go free. If not…" Tristan shrugged, knowing that the snake's mind could conjure worse fates than he might suggest.

And so it was an awkward procession through the sewer tunnels. Snakeboy slithered on ahead a little ways, always looking over his shoulder at Tristan, who in turn walked very casually behind him, claws out, prepared for any sort of treachery on its part.

It was only about ten minutes before the snake slowed. "It'ssssss down there….sssssstairs that will take you to their guardsssss."

Tristan nodded and turned to let the snake pass him on the way out.

The snake looked back and forth for a moment, watching for any sign of movement from Tristan before slithering off into the darkness.

Letting go a deep breath that he hadn't realized that he'd been holding, Tristan proceeded forward toward the passage that the snake had indicated.

At the bottom of a flight of his stairs, his enhanced vision could make out the forms of two men guarding the doors. One was massive, built like a troll and looking like he possessed roughly the same temperament. Grey skin, thick shoulders, and a permanent sneer on his face; Tristan was really hoping not to have to fight his way in.

The second man was more interesting. His form was slight and his coloring quite normal. He could easily have passed for normal human if he had been content to hold still. From the way he was moving, dancing around without a care in the world, Tristan was sure that he couldn't possibly possess any bones at all.

Tristan whistled, the sound loud and echoing through the tunnels. It was how he used to alert the guards to his presence.

When they looked up towards him, he grinned. "Guess old habits die hard." He paused and moved a little ways down the stairs. "I'm and old friend of the Morlocks on this side of the tunnels and I'd like to see your leader."

The troll moved forward and eyed him suspiciously. "What do you think, Matty?"

Tristan was surprised when the other one spoke, for even in a whisper, his voice was a deep bass that would be more expected from the giant next to him. "He's not lying, but not telling the full truth either. But he's way too clean to be from the other side."

"And he's standing right in front of you," Tristan interjected. "Thank you very much for your ringing endorsement but if I'd wanted to do you people harm, do you really think I would've whistled before I came down the stairs? You'd both have been dead already."

"Matty?" The big man's voice was slow and thick, marking him as being a little on the simple minded side.

"He's still telling the truth." Matty's voice was tinged with a little bit of nervousness this time. "Come on down here, let me have a better look at you."

Tristan proceeded down the stairs and into the area in front of the door. Matty struck a light and held it up to some rags wrapped around an old tire iron. "Whoa, you're quite the looker, aren't cha? What's your name?"

"Tristan Olivera."

Matty froze. "What'd you say, boy?"

"My name is Tristan Olivera."

"Sunder."

"Yeah, Matty."

"Go find the boss. Tell him that Tristan is here to see him."

"Sure thing, Matty."

The big man opened a door into a well-lit room and ducked through it, leaving it slightly cracked open behind him. Tristan could see people moving around inside, walking to and fro, carting boxes and moving things from place to place.

"Hey, Matty." Tristan turned to face the other man.

"Yo."

"Prepare your guards for a fight. I followed a member of a raiding party down here. He seemed to know right where he was going, catch my drift?"

Matty nodded. "'preciate that. Why don't you go inside and wait, Tristan. The boss' been expecting you."

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 24??_

_Location: Remnants of New York City _

_Entry Continued_

_How do you explain the Morlocks?_

_In the old days they were the citizens of an underground city. They lived there to avoid the light and the questions, and the people that caused them all their problems. They fought a long running war for territory with some of their brethren and they seemed to survive by virtue of their tenacity…_

This was not the Morlock headquarters as Tristan remembered it.

Gone were the old cars, the rusted bodies that houses the beds of some half a dozen mutants at a time. Gone was the stench, the smell of rotting shit and sewage. In it's place was something very different than he expected.

The area itself was much the same. At one point it might have been a central chamber for maintenance or a cistern or something, but now it was simply a series of 6 chambers interlocked with open gateways that led from room to room.

In the two farther rooms were a series of cots and old beds, very reminiscent of a youth hostile or a homeless shelter that Tristan had seen before. In the nearest rooms were table, lined with all sorts of stuff, most of which looked like medical supplies. Bottles of aspirin, Tylenol, and thousands of prescription drugs sat next to hot water bottles, heat packs, bandages and disinfectants.

As he was turning to inspect the two furthest rooms, a door opened off to one side, and Tristan craned his head around in time to see the one that Matty had called Sunder going back out to guard duty.

The last room extended well beyond where it had previously. The last time Tristan had been down here, that room had ended after about ten feet with what amounted to a wide moat and some more tunnels. Now, thousands of old carpets, blankets and sleeping bags covered the floor. Most of which were currently inhabited.

It might not have been high society living, but by all standards the Morlocks looked like they'd been doing pretty well for themselves since the last time Tristan had seen them.

Wandering over towards what looked like the common area for sleeping and general chit chat, Tristan stopped, sniffing the air. Musty air and the smell of old blood filled his nostrils as he opened his senses up completely. There was dirt and grime, the stink of bodies pressed together, though nowhere near as bad as it could've been… and there was something else. A faint smell, underneath it all… something so familiar that he could almost taste it on his tongue. Something important.

Whipping his head around, Tristan scanned the crowd of Morlocks as they moved back and forth in their duties.

And then it just as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

"Tristan."

The words came from behind him, forcing him to whirl around again to face whomever was addressing him.

Charcoal skin seemed to shimmer softly in the light of so many torches, along with long white hair and beard. He stood tall, with the dignity of age, and looked on Tristan with an air of entertainment. As always though, his expression was tinged with sadness.

"It can't be…" Tristan whispered the words as he stepped closer towards the man. "They tell me it's been some four hundred years. You should be…"

"Dead?" His grin was wry. "Perhaps I am simply unwilling to let go of this world yet."

"Caliban, it is you!" Tristan stepped forward and hugged the man fiercely, a gesture which seemed to shock the older man. "You stubborn old bastard, how…?" He gestured around the room, indicating the current state of things. "How're you still alive? How did it come to be like this… what has happened!?"

His words gushed out of him faster than his mouth could pronounce them. Caliban waited patiently for him to cease his ramblings before he began to speak.

"Much of this is your fault, Tristan." He said, indicating the rooms around him. "Perhaps you recall our last meeting? A small gift of some thirty thousand dollars?"

"That was… how many years ago now, you can't possibly still be living off of it now!"

"Ah, in truth you are right. But instead of spending it frivolously as many wanted I should, I invested a good portion of the money in companies that I suspected would do rather well for themselves."

Tristan thought about it for a moment. Caliban was a precognitive mutant of some strength, but the visions were often vague at best. However, if he could have used those visions and some of the things he saw in order to make educated guesses about the stocks of companies… the idea was fantastic in the extreme, but it seemed to have worked. Then it clicked.

"That's what Matty meant when he said that the boss had been expecting me. You've had a vision."

"I've had many. Any man who lives as long as I have, even without the gift of sight will have a vision or two of his own."

Tristan laughed. "You've not a changed a bit. Still vague and cryptic, and laughingly frustrating. By all the gods that have ever walked the Earth, Caliban it is good to see you."

"It is good to be seen. Now, how may I help you?"

Tristan steeled himself, wanting to ask a million questions, but settled for the most important one first. "Caliban, what happened to the world?"

He nodded, obviously expecting the question. "Walk with me, Tristan."

The two men walked towards the door that Caliban had likely come out of. "If I remember correctly, you died in 2005, correct?"

Tristan nodded, not speaking. The memories of his death were still too clear for him.

"The Topsider's have long since lost track of their records of what happened and when. We on the other hand, have taken the world's history to heart. It was about five years after you died. We don't know the specifics of the event, even now, but I foresaw a great tragedy. So I sent my people to the surface to collect some of the things that I knew we would need. The money which you had provided us with had returned exponentially. We purchased sleeping bags, discount carpets, cleaning supplies, and medical supplies in massive quantities… we also purchased books, on history, on economics, philosophy, and all of the other things that the Topsiders would come to forget."

"When it happened, all of the machines stopped. The waters rose and claimed a full third of the city. We only just had time to wall off the tunnels before the waters came. Worse, the skies turned black and storms unlike anything you can imagine plagued the world for months. It was unbelievable. For a time I actually believed that we had encountered the Biblical Armageddon."

They'd passed through the doors and up a flight of stairs into what looked like an old subway station. There were books everywhere. Shelves covered every single wall from tiled floor to arched ceiling, and they were overflowing.

"We saved what we could, and who we could. Many of your former compatriots came to us for shelter in those days. They helped us to persevere, bringing with them more books and supplies."

Tristan turned to ask about who had come but Caliban forestalled him. "Most you would not know. Your Love never came through, I'm afraid."

Tears welled up at the corners of his eyes, but Tristan forced them down and nodded. "They went out to try and stop it, didn't they?"

Caliban nodded and indicated that they should continue to walk. "Yes. You were not the only stubborn one amongst them. They refused to sit idly by and watch the world disintegrate around them. I do not know what they managed to accomplish, only that I did not see most of them again after that."

Nodding again, Tristan asked, "So what happened, exactly? What caused it all? A mutant?"

"No one knows." Caliban said sadly. "I expect that's why you're here."

Tristan started, a shocked expression on his face. Caliban laughed.

"You have forever been an insatiable soul, my friend. I saw your return about ten years after the incident. A new soldier had just joined us, but her mind was completely broken. She shut herself away from everyone and everything, even the majority of her power was hidden from her. But something in her arrival triggered the vision. It was as strong as I'd ever received. I've been expecting you for some time now."

Tristan looked up at the massive chandeliers which hung over the converted subway. The room was enormous, containing more books than even the library at school had.

"Caliban, this is magnificent…"

"Why, thank you. Here, come this way."

The two men stepped aboard the remains of an old train which had been completely gutted on the inside. The tattered remains of a couple of armchairs were scattered around, and a hole had been cut into the top to allow for smoke from the fire to evacuate.

When Caliban gestured to one of the chairs, Tristan sat without hesitation.

"Though it has been many years since we've last seen each other, Tristan, there are certain things that I feel you need to know."

Tristan nodded, waiting.

"First, I believe that it is your purpose to discover the nature of the events which led to our current situation. For as long as I've known you, you've possessed a drive to know and understand the world around you. I trust that this hasn't changed with your apparent demise?"

Tristan laughed. "No. In fact, I was already planning on doing precisely that."

"Good. I am glad to see that despite your change in forms your soul remains as strong as ever."

Caliban rose and the two proceeded out into the library again before turning away and climbing a set of stairs in the far wall. Outside, Tristan could just begin to see the light of dawn rising above the hills in the distance.

"At the top of these stairs you'll find a set of train tracks. If you follow them far enough they will lead you into Salem Center."

Tristan nodded, rolling his shoulders and bouncing back and forth on his feet, his mind and body both eager to be off. "The mansion."

"Yes. I suspect that you wish to visit there regardless, but it is also the first step for you in solving the mystery with which you find yourself wrestling. It is possible that there is some information that you may find helpful."

Nodding again, Tristan extended his hand to Caliban in a more familiar gesture of greeting and parting. "I'll be back by nightfall, I suspect."

_I left Caliban standing there for a moment, watching me as I disappeared into the pre-dawn. Though I would never admit it to him, the idea that he'd been waiting for me all this time was a little unnerving. And who was this woman who'd triggered the vision? _

_A good question, but not one that I was going to be able to tackle any time soon. Odds are she was long gone anyways. For the moment, I simply put my head to the task at hand. _

_My homecoming. _

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 24??_

_Location: Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters_

_It was probably forty miles from the outskirts of the city to the station at Salem Center, plus another five or six from there to the Mansion. Thankfully I was accustomed to running forty miles a day, and the time it took gave me plenty of time to think._

_Why was it that I had come back now? Had it taken me that long to crawl back up the length of the River? Had it been some sort of external dimension where time flowed differently? Was all of this related to the Apocalypse conflict? Who was the woman in Caliban's story, who'd provoked the vision of me returning? What had happened to the people that I loved? Had they continued to fight? Had they died in another conflict? Or had they been the ones who stayed behind to try and fight whatever force it was that had caused the Change?_

_And most importantly, what the hell was it that had caused it in the first place?_

_All of them good questions, and not a single one of them with an answer. _

_It was midday by the time I made it up the rise of Greymalkin Lane. I could see the shadow of the mansion in the distance…_

The ivy which still seemed a decoration on the old stone mansion looked as though it had turned into a destructive force in its actions upon the walls surrounding it. Here and there piles of rubble had spilled out into the empty streets, in one case managing to block the street almost entirely.

It had been strange to see the town of Salem Center so deserted. It was a small little tourist village for the most part, filled with street side café's and fashionable little restaurants. Now it was completely and utterly deserted. Even though the city hadn't sustained the kind of physical damage that New York had, it was just as dead.

Xavier's seemed a more personal affront to his senses. Duke should still be there, playing his electric violin from the rooftop. Mimi should've been walking the grounds, listening, or maybe been downstairs sparring with someone or something. Sean should've been playing tricks and trying to confess his feelings to Sam, and Sam… she should've been there, just like all the others.

There wasn't a single spark of life left in the building, and it didn't take senses like his to notice it. It left him feeling empty, and anger was the only thing to fill that particular kind of hollow.

Leaping over the remains of the wall and the gate, Tristan started the long walk up towards the front door of the mansion.

The front door to the mansion swung open with an eerie sort of silence, revealing the remains of the front hall. The grand staircase stood directly in front of the door, along with the remnants of a few bits of furniture laying here and there.

Gauging from the state of things in the room, the place had been abandoned for some time now. The furniture appeared to have been victims of more natural forms of destruction, like termites, rather than some sort of supernatural horror ripping through the house.

Stepping gingerly into the entryway, Tristan tested his weight upon the floor, hoping that it, at least, had maintained its integrity.

It had.

With a small sigh of relief, Tristan moved through the first floor with stone faced determination. Sweeping from room to room, he analyzed the things he saw as coldly as possible. Even after four hundred years, it was obvious that something had happened here. Glasses were tipped over on the tables in the living and dining room, and old, and remarkably bad smelling jug of orange juice had been left out upon the counter.

Whatever had happened here, the people who had been here had fled quickly.

With his cursory inspection of the first floor done, Tristan steeled himself for the inspection of the dormitories. Proceeding room by room, he was glad to find that most things had been eaten away by time itself. There really wasn't anything left for him to find, except perhaps the occasional scrap of cloth or paper that had managed to survive.

It wasn't until he came to the junior and senior dormitories on the upper floors that he began to have problems. Memories flooded over him as he passed from door to door, images of faces, friends and allies haunting him as he moved through. His own room still brought a rush of warmth to him, though he was unsurprised to find it had changed since his days at the academy.

Gone were the hammocks, the low tables and small stands that he and Sean had used for their time together. Gone were the floating remnants of illusions, dancing bears and the like, that had been a near constant experience in here.

But even with all that, it felt like home.

The blankets on the bed had long since been covered with dust, but Tristan pushed them aside to find the mattress in something not too far from a clean state. Flopping down upon the mattress, he lay there, staring at the ceiling as he considered his next course.

"You're forgetting something, aren't you?"

Tristan's eyes flew open as sat bolt upright.

"Sean!"

The young man before him smiled back. Tipping his hat towards Tristan he spoke again. "Been a long time, guy. Glad to see you're back."

Words failed as Tristan tried to speak, but Sean kept right on going anyways. "No worries, man. You saved us all with that stunt of yours." The specter grinned and shrugged. "Just try and be a little more careful, next time, okay?"

With those words, the wraith faded, and Tristan was left sitting on the bed with his mouth hanging open. "Sean…"

Rolling to his feet, Tristan inspected the area where the thing had been standing only a moment before. None of the dust had been moved… but the room was definitely warmer.

"Sean!" Tristan called out into the empty house.

There was no response.

Dashing out of the room, Tristan made his way through the rest of the junior dormitories at a breakneck pace. Each time he entered the room of a person he had known, he hoped against all odds that something like that would happen again.

But it never did.

Crushed, Tristan ascended to the top floor where the senior dorms would've been. As he had suspected, none of the rooms here showed any signs of a hasty departure. The senior class had been some of the ones going to try and fight, or had been the ones helping the others get to safety. They had known what the score was, and what they had to do in order to fulfill their roles.

Being late in the winter, daylight had begun to fade by the time Tristan had finished searching the senior rooms. Nothing looked even remotely familiar, nothing had given him any clue as the to the identities of the people who'd lived there.

In truth, that shouldn't have surprised him. It was nearly five years after his death that the trouble had begun. He wouldn't have even known any of these people.

Frustration began to set in as Tristan moved back down towards the main level of the mansion. Surely there was something here that would give him some sort of information, some kind of a clue as to what had happened.

As he had once done when he was a student here, Tristan took his problems to the kitchen. After throwing the orange juice away and clearing some of the dust and dirt off of the stove, he managed to get a small fire going using some of the dried remains of the furniture.

Sitting there in the dim light and the silence, he rubbed his hands together in an effort to keep them warm, now that he had stopped moving.

"Anything I can do to help?"

Taken by surprise yet again, Tristan leaped back away from the fire, and crouched in an attack position as he searched for the source of the sound.

A slight giggle came from the doorway nearest the main entrance and as Tristan watched he saw a young woman materialize out of the darkness. She wore a knee-length skirt and sweater, along with a pair of boots that looked unfortunate if you were to be kicked with them.

"You look like you could use a little bit of a pick me up, brother."

"Sam… what's going on here? Sean showed up too… I don't understand!"

Warmth filled him as she came over and wrapped her arms around his furry torso. "You know, I never saw you like this… you changed before I came to school here. Do you remember the first day we met?"

Tristan nodded, his arms going around her instinctively. "It was your first day at the half-day program. You were sitting all alone at lunch."

"And you came over and sat down to talk to me. "

"Sam… what's going on here? What happened to everything?"

He could feel her shake her head, even in her current position.

"I missed you, Tristan. Trust yourself, and don't worry about us. We did everything we could. You would've been proud of us."

With nothing left to support the weight of his arms, they fell lifeless to his side. Tears came unbidden to his eyes, which he scrubbed at carefully with the back of his hands.

Rage filled him, flooding out of his every pore as he thought about what sort of terrible things could have taken away all the friends that he had loved.

Lashing out with a kick, he tore the kitchen island free from its shabby moorings and sent it spiraling across the room to shatter against the wall. Bits of wood flew everywhere; a few even landed in the small fire that he had built, causing it to flare brighter for a second before dying down to its normal level again.

The same could not be said for Tristan's anger. Fueled now by the phantoms he had seen, his anger bubbled just below the surface, watching and waiting.

Summoning up the shattered remains of his willpower, Tristan left the kitchen and proceeded over to where the Wall still stood. Some of the papers had aged, but here, protected from the elements by four walls and a mostly whole roof, they had survived.

His own face was the first one he picked out. Pictures of him and Harmony, laughing together, of him and mimi, training. Of the whole squad preparing for another practice session. He smiled, looking over the faces of his friends.

Following the line of pictures however, his smile soon dimmed. The same faces appeared next to his in other pictures as well, under their own names.

Turning away from the wall, an expression of grim determination plastered on his face, Tristan marched through the kitchen and dining room and right out the back door of the mansion.

The back yard of the Institute was comprised of 40 acres of landed, bordered by the house, the walls, and a massive cliff. Commonly known as the Back 40, it had been one of Tristan's primary haunts when he'd been a student here.

Off to one side of the yard, there was a beautiful rose garden. Even from here, Tristan could see the white marble of the headstones rising amongst the cold green grass and the rosebushes. Snowflakes drifted down from the sky now, their pace increasing even as Tristan walked across the yard.

Thankful now for having taken the opportunity to get warm when he had, Tristan strode through the swirling snow, barely pausing to give it a second thought. The gravestones rose up in front of him, larger and larger until they occupied the entirety of his vision.

Many of the stones had names that Tristan didn't recognize. The remainder however, were a different story.

There were more than he'd expected.

Mimi.

Sam.

Sean.

Scott.

Adam.

Pete.

Cassidy.

Washington.

McCoy.

Xavier.

Harmony.

The idea that all of them were gone… the thought that no matter how much he might want to, he'd never hear them laugh or cry again, was more than he could bear.

Sinking to his knees in the middle of the garden, his stoicism finally broke. Huddled upon the ground in the middle of a snowstorm, his tears flowed freely, only to freeze upon his fur a split second later.

Time passed slowly for him in that moment. He couldn't have said how long he knelt there, bowed with his head upon his knees, weeping uncontrollably over the graves of his friends, but when he looked up again, several inches of snow had fallen, and his body was stiff with the cold.

"Tristan…"

The words were a whisper upon the wind, searing hot in a world of bitter, bitter cold. His head whipped up and he peered out into the storm.

"Tristan…"

What started as a shadow amongst the snowstorm soon materialized into an apparition just like the others.

With a face he knew far too well.

"Harmony…"

Standing was an effort that his body was unwilling to make. He lurched to his feet, stumbling towards the ghost of his love only to fall again at her feet.

He felt her hands rifling through his fur, pulling him close. Just like the last time, he felt her touch send a coursing warmth through his body. His hands pulled at her, tugging her down to his level.

She knelt before him, her arms cradling his head against her. "Come, love, you need to get inside. To be warm again."

Tristan shook his head sobbing softly. "No… if I let go, you'll leave again."

"Never."

With seemingly little effort she guided Tristan to his feet.

"Tristan."

He looked up, his eyes shining once more with fresh tears.

"The ones you love will never leave you, even in Death. They stay on and become a part of you. Just like you did with me."

She hugged him close again, her warmth suffusing him. "Promise me that you'll be careful… that you'll take care of yourself?"

"I promise."

"I love you, Tristan."

His blood ran hot and his body contorted within the fire of her embrace. For a split second everything was white, and then his vision returned and she was gone. Tears of longing streamed down his face.

" I love you, too."

Tristan paused briefly, plucking a handful of roses to place upon the graves of his loved ones. Though not a religious man himself, he said a brief prayer for each of them.

The roses lay crimson red against the pure white snow. It was an image that burned itself into his memory, coloring everything that he knew.

As he turned his back to head towards the mansion, Tristan never stopped to wonder about the sudden snowstorm, or the roses which had bloomed within it.

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 24??_

_Location: Xavier's Institute for Gifted Youngsters_

_Entry Continued_

In all his time at Xavier's, Tristan had never once been forced to take the emergency stairs down to the sublevels.

Until now.

Hidden as they were, and behind a pressurized seal, getting to the stairs had been no easy feat. It had taken nearly three hours and a lot of patience to crack the seal and pry the doors open.

It was strange being in the house and going through all the places he had known. Stranger still to be confronted by the apparitions of his friends and loved ones as he did so.

He had idly considered the thought that he was simply losing his mind. Maybe he was finally cracking under the pressure of all the strange things that had happened to him up until this point.

Or maybe it had actually happened.

Tristan ran his hands through the fur on his head, feeling the soft touch of Harmony's fingers and the lingering warmth of her embrace. It had happened, of that he was certain. The reasons and energies involved in it were foreign to him, but he knew better than most that his senses could be trusted.

Though, as he descended the stairs towards the third sublevel, and the Danger Room, he began to question his common sense.

Even from the stairwell he could feel the wrongness of it. There was something more here than stale air and a few centuries of quiet. It was a silence, truer and deeper than anything he had ever known.

It felt like a tomb.

Though unsurprised, Tristan was heartbroken to see the bodies when he left the stairwell. Dried husks still wore the former clothes of their stations. There were black combat uniforms everywhere, maybe five or ten lay scattered around the room; a pair of red crystal glasses lay uselessly by the head of one corpse.

Tristan knelt down beside Scott's remains for a moment, touching his forehead to the same spot on his former friend.

"I swear, I'll fix this. I don't know how, but I will."

Stepping over the body, Tristan kicked open the door to the girl's locker room. He tried not to see the blue and gold uniforms that littered the floor, or the dried husks that lay in or beside them. Willing himself to steel and silence, he glanced only at the name plates above the lockers.

Mimi's was all the way at the end. Without pausing for breath, Tristan ripped the door off the hinges and smiled a feral grin that would've sent anyone who'd known him running for cover.

Weapons of every shape and size hung in the locker. Everything from knives and batons to flick sticks and a compound bow. The only thing that wasn't here were her guns, which didn't really surprise him. They would be in the armory.

"Thanks, Mimi. Even in death, you've never failed me."

Grabbing a few pair of flick sticks, the compound, and a quiver of fiberglass arrows with nasty looking heads on them, Tristan stalked back out of the locker room and down the hall towards the armory.

The picture was starting to form in his head as he shoved the partially open door to the armory. All of these dead bodies, at once… so many of them without wounds.

He reviewed the options as he picked up the lockbox containing Mimi's guns and a few spare boxes of ammo.

Despite the lack of wounds, a psychic attack would've had to have been unimaginably strong in order to take out that number of people. Not to mention, no blast of that nature would've been able to cause the worldwide destruction and panic that followed it.

It could've been a nuke. The people here could've been sealed in when it went off… the radiation could've leaked in, or the air run out maybe.

Tristan shook his head as he picked up a shotgun off the rack and shoved it into a duffel bag along with a couple boxes of shells.

No… that made no sense either. People would've been fully dressed, and probably huddled together rather than spread out like that.

"What the fuck happened here?"

He spoke the words aloud, and turned to leave the armory. It wasn't until he was near the door that something else caught his eye. There was a stand in the back of the room with armor on it. Matte black armor, made from a combination of nomex and polymers.

His armor. It had been specially made for him by an old room mate. Custom designed to fit over his fur and stay quiet when he worked.

"Of all the…"

Dropping the duffel bag, Tristan made his way over to the suit of armor. It looked like a regular uniform, save for the fact that it was designed to be nearly invisible at night. It was also nearly twice as thick as the regular uniforms.

Doffing the rags that he was wearing, Tristan grabbed the armor off the stand and dressed himself quickly in more combat worthy attire. Though it was unlikely that he would need it immediately, it felt good to be back in his own gear again. Besides, you could never be too careful when there were mutants involved.

Satisfied that his search was complete, he made his was out of the armory and back to the emergency stairs. The elevators sure as hell weren't going to work.

That's when he noticed it.

The door to sub-level four was standing open.

It had a dent in it that looked like it had been made by someone running full tilt through it, without bothering to really allow it to open.

If he hadn't been covered in black fur, Tristan would've turned white.

There was only one thing down on sub-level four.

The deep security cells.

Only one of those had ever been occupied in all his days at Xavier's.

Tristan had read about him in the Summer's File. That was where most of the data came from.

Proteus.

He was a reality warper stronger than the world had ever seen. Mimi could influence events for the better or worse, impose her will on the probabilities that ruled the world.

Proteus could've ripped reality from its hinges, rolled it into a ball and played galactic jai lai with it.

It was a difference of degrees, really.

Tristan tore down the stairs at light speed, barely pausing to turn the corners. The door at the bottom had been destroyed. Some sort of blast had blackened the walls and scattered the place with bones.

Seeing the destruction was almost enough to make Tristan sick… his body curled around itself, trying to heave out several hundred years worth of things not eaten all at once.

Blinded by rage at the destruction and death he had seen, Tristan finally went over the edge. The world faded from his vision, save for the path he wanted to take. The path that would give him answers.

Leaving the cells, Tristan turned on his heel and fled the Xavier Institute and returned to the railroad tracks. They would lead him back into the city.

And back to the Morlocks.

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 24??_

_Location: Morlock Tunnels_

_Entry Continued_

"CALIBAN!" The shout rose through the tunnels, echoing eerily as Tristan strode into the main chamber where the Morlocks lived.

Everyone in the room fled for cover. Most of them hid beneath their blankets and sleeping bags. Others simply fled into the tunnels or surrounding rooms.

"CALIBAN! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM ME!"

A primal roar ripped through him as he stood in the center of the room. Dust shook from the ceiling as the sound died away.

"I KNOW YOU MUST'VE KNOWN SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, YOU BASTARD! COME OUT HERE AND FACE ME!"

The response he got was not exactly what he'd had in mind.

She stood in the center of the cowering mass of Morlocks and strode towards him, purpose clear in her eyes. She was smallish, even tiny, in comparison to him, but she was built from hard muscle and had enough scars to show that she was more than capable of surviving.

Her hair was long, black, and coated with dust; her eyes were a peculiar light blue color, surrounded by black on the outside instead of white.

That couldn't be a good sign.

She came to a stop in front of him, looking for all the world like the age old adage of scorned woman. Heat poured out of her eyes that would've scorched most men into non-existence.

Not that he cared.

"Stand down, please."

Tristan looked the girl up and down, taking a deep breath to keep from screaming at her. "Look, little girl, I've had a really long, really bad, really fucked up couple of days, so please, just get out of my way."

What had previously been a rather general sort of anger rapidly transformed into a cold-blooded glower aimed directly at him, made even less subtle by her shift into a combat stance.

"Come on," he said, his feet shifting to mimic hers. "Can't you just let it go? I said 'please'."

"So did I, puppy dog."

Tristan's temper flared as those hated words spilled out of her mouth. "Listen, bitch. I was real polite about it the first time, but I'm starting to lose my patience with you. Get the fuck out of my way, or I'm going hammer your sorry ass right through the goddamned floor." He put on a fake smile and a simpering voice. "Got it, pumpkin?"

It was his reflexes that saved him. She aimed at his solar plexus, fingers stiffened into a knife-like point. It was a blow designed to stun or incapacitate.

Thankfully, his speed was more than a match for hers. With a quick twist of his body, Tristan pulled out of her way and seized onto her wrist. Gripping hard, he twisted viciously, spilling her onto the dusty sewer floor.

Less than a second passed before she was on her feet and coming after him again, a vicious snarl filling the air between them.

Tristan growled deep in his throat, a warning sound which caused those few Morlocks who'd regained their feet to back away even further. They didn't want to be a part of this fight.

For a second it looked as though she would run right into him, using her weight to carry him over. It wasn't until she disappeared that he realized his mistake.

The shift in the air was so subtle, it was undetectable, even to him. One second she was running at him full speed, the next, he felt her foot collide with the side of his knee.

She'd teleported… silent and deadly, she'd just appeared beside him, foot extended, and taken his leg out from under him.

Tristan howled in pain as he felt something pop and tear within the knee. Red streaks shot through his vision as he landed, digging his claws into the dirt and concrete.

"Now. Surrender." Her words were laced with venom. She spat them with a force that nearly made him comply on instinct alone.

Shoving the command aside, Tristan lunged at her, moving like hamstrung lightning. The flick batons appeared in his hands as though by magic as he bellowed out his rage.

Her head snapped to one side as the first baton made impact. She'd barely had time to register the blow before he drove his fist into her stomach, lifting her up off the floor.

As she fell, surprise lit her face for the briefest of moments. It was obvious that the girl was used to people falling apart after a single devastating blow like that.

Guess she'd just have to learn to live with disappointment.

"TRISTAN! What're you doing?"

The words came from Caliban, who had finally appeared at one of the doorways into the room.

She grunted as she got up off the floor. "Puppy's come ready to play, has he?"

He tensed, shoulders lowered as he prepared to charge her.

"TRISTAN! Don't do it!"

He lunged at her, the flick stick aimed at her throat.

"NO!"

At the last possible second, her hand whipped out, colliding with his wrist. A shock ran up and down his arm as the numbness settled in and he watched as the weapon fell uselessly from his fingers.

The girl caught the falling weapon out of the air and spun away from him, bringing it up to an attack position in a move than was nearly too quick to follow.

He felt the bones in his jaw break before he even realized that she'd hit him.

The crunch reverberated all the way through his body.

Murder and rage filled his mind, forcing the pain away.

Ignoring the impulse to scream, he set his jaw and slashed at her, claws ripping through the thin layer of skin that separated him from her blood.

"FRACTURE! NO!"

Face distended with pain and anger, Tristan lunged at her, his injuries a memory of some distant past. After the first slash, she backed away drawing a pair of knives from her belt.

For a moment, it was a standstill. The whole world held its breath waiting for the destruction to begin.

The very next second, it began in earnest.

Fracture lunged forward, her knives flashing in the light of the thousand candles which lit the room. Blades and claws met over and over again as the two fought desperately for the advantage.

Dodging to one side of her knife thrust, Tristan grabbed her wrist and swung her face first into one of the brick columns that supported the roof. There was a satisfying crunch as her nose and cheekbone collapsed under the impact.

A slash of fire burned across his stomach as he recoiled. Hot blood spilled from the cut as he backed away. His foot came up with inhuman speed crashing into the side of her head and driving her face back into the pillar.

"TRISTAN!" Caliban's voice took on an undignified shrieking tone as he ran towards the two of them.

Grabbing the dazed Fracture by the hair, Tristan kicked her twice more before hurtling her backwards into the floor. Her head bounced like a hard melon against the stone, a sick crunch accompanying the motion.

"NO! DON'T DO IT! TRISTAN!"

Whirling around, Tristan grabbed Caliban by the throat and lifted him off the ground. Fire burned in his eyes as he closed his fist tighter and tighter on the little man's neck.

Words escaped him as he poured all the rage from his body and soul into the death grip he had on Caliban. Several of the Morlocks flung themselves at his, crashing into him with the effectiveness of ants diving into a tornado.

"Tri-"

With a casual disdain, Tristan flung Caliban clear across the room to slam into one of the pillars. He fell, limp and lifeless, like a sack of grain.

Tristan would deal with him later.

Turning back towards where the girl lay unconscious, Tristan stopped.

She was gone.

The pain was unparalleled. He could see the knife point protruding from his chest now, the end covered with bits of blood and muscle fiber.

Sensing his consciousness waning, Tristan whirled on her, tearing the knife from her hand. Both hands rammed forward, claws extended.

There was a soft _chink_ as they hit the bricks on the other side of her chest.

She gasped, her eyes wide with fright and pain.

"Tristan…!" The words were soft, spoken as a whisper, raspy and dry like a fall day. "Look at her, Tristan… Look at her arm…" Caliban hold a hand up to his throat, as if it were the only way he could keep his voice from failing.

Tristan lifted the girl higher into the air, his claws ripping her wounds open even wider.

As her head lolled to one side, he could pick out the edges of a black and gold tattoo on her shoulder. Yanking one claw viciously from the wound, he tore the sleeve off of her shirt and stared in wonder.

The Xavier's logo stood out in clear relief against the pale white of her skin. Beneath it was a list of names… not many, but a few. Least of which was his own.

"Tristan…" Caliban was closer now, his words spoken once more in the soft tone he favored. "It's Mimi, Tristan… she showed up about ten years after the Change."

Looking into the blue black eyes of one of his closest friends, Tristan's mind reeled. He felt himself falling, and heard the screams from nearby.

Then everything went black.

- CHAPTER END -

_Date: January 2457_

_Location: Morlock Infirmary_

_There are simply some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed._

_There are days you should simply have rolled over and gone back to sleep, because as soon as you're up and out of bed, it's all downhill from there. _

_With that anecdote in mind, I woke up in Hell. _

"Hold him still you fucking idiots! I've got to get this wound closed or he's gonna bleed out all over the goddamned floor."

Tristan tried to open his eyes and see who they were talking about, but the pain hit him like a ton of bricks. Eight people seized his limbs and another straddled his stomach. He could smell hot iron and the scent of a woman

"Tristan! If you can hear me, try not to move! We're going to cauterize the wound in your chest."

He didn't have time to really process what she was saying before the fire began. Pain and suffering ripped from his lungs and roared out into the space beyond the bodies of those holding him down. Two of the ones holding his legs dropped their respective limbs and ran.

"You idiots! GET BACK HERE! Are you trying to kill him and us!?" The voice came from the woman sitting on his stomach. "Get back here and hold his legs, or I'll cut your cock off and use that to stuff his wounds, you understand me?!"

Within seconds, he felt the weight on his legs increase again.

"Tristan, bite down on this…" She shoved a leather wrapped stick in between his teeth. "This is going to hurt, a lot. Try to stay conscious, okay?"

Unsure of what was about to happen, he felt her get off his stomach and move down by his injured knee.

Agony seared every nerve in his body. Hit bit down, harder than he'd known he could, teeth digging viciously into the leather as he fought not to swallow his own tongue.

Seconds later the stick in his mouth snapped in two and the blackness closed in again.

_I remember waking up a few more times as my wounds were treated. Without the benefit of modern medical tools for surgery, a lot of the wounds had to be treated in a more primitive fashion. Whiskey and fire were the tools of the day, and the doctor applied each in a liberal fashion. _

_The next time I woke up, I mean truly woke, they told me that nearly a week had passed. The woman who was put in charge of me, a medi-nazi that everyone calls Doc, threatened all sorts of bodily harm to me if I so much as considered getting out of bed. _

_There are some things that are too unpleasant to record, even here._

_After nearly a full day of laying there, Caliban came to see me. _

"They told me that you'd awoken."

Tristan's head snapped up, tracking the voice. No one was visible yet, but he knew the age old mumble, even as raspy as it was now.

"You're a real piece of work, Caliban. I can't believe you're still fuckin breathing."

"I have survived somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred years, my young friend, I don't –"

"Don't. Call me that."

"Tristan…"

"You lied to me, Caliban. Actually no, you deliberately withheld information from me, which is just as bad. You could've told me that Mimi was here… you could've told me about Proteus…" The words were petulant and wrathful. "You could've told me more about what happened, but no. Just like always, you had to keep your fucking secrets."

Caliban approached the bed, hands held out in a non-threatening manner. "That's not the way it –"

Tristan growled. "You take one step closer to this bed, and I'll finish what I started."

He stopped, about five feet away. "Will you at least allow me the opportunity to explain my actions? Or have you become so unreasonable as to think you understand it all, already?"

"DON'T YOU TALK TO ME ABOUT REASON!" Despite his best efforts, the words came out as a scream, startling Caliban to step back even farther. "If you want to explain yourself, go right the fuck ahead. Just don't expect me to fall weeping with sympathy or be overcome with an urge to forgive your sorry ass."

Caliban sighed, his shoulders falling even further. "You are the last hope for me, Tristan. For me, and for my people. We are _dying. _The young man I remember had a good heart and a strong soul. He helped people who needed help because that was what he did. Won't you at least give me a chance to show you that I wasn't trying to deceive you?"

Tristan glowered at the gray skinned man, but said nothing.

"I never knew for certain that the event known as the Change was brought about by this man you call, Proteus. I suspected that he might in some way be involved, but the scale of the events seemed too massive, even for him."

"Pre-cognition is not an exact science, and when I was first overtaken by the vision it took me some time to recover. All I saw was a being made of light walking through the city, and the world changing around them. It was vague, frustratingly so, but I knew that this person would be a danger."

"So, as I said, I sent my people topside, looking for the things we would need to survive. You must understand, Tristan, that I had to protect my people, no matter the cost. As they came back, they began to bring in reports of strange happenings on the surface. Massive numbers of people were manifesting powers, more so than ever before. Millions manifested in the space of ten minutes! It was unimaginable .All across the world, mutants began to spring up like dandelions."

"The war started immediately. Too many people with destructive powers had manifested too quickly. The collateral damage from such an energy release was staggering. Entire cities were destroyed as a result, and within a few hours, Wide Awake agents had appeared in nearly every major city in the world."

"I sent word to Mimi at the Institute, wanting to let her know about the vision that I had experienced, but she and many of her comrades had already set out in an attempt to contain the situation and help out where they could."

Tristan spoke for the first time since the tale had begun. "Why did you send word to Mimi and not Xavier or one of the other professors?"

"I did not know Charles Xavier. Not in the way that I knew you, or Mimi. You two, along with another young woman named Karen, had taken a more active role in our lives than the others did. You seem to think that everyone has similar access to us as you do, but it is simply not the truth. Most people, Xavier's or otherwise, never know we exist. Or if they do, they don't know where or how to find us."

"Go on." Tristan's words were flat and cold, his anger still underscoring the words.

"Mimi never responded to the message, but one of the professors, a younger man, named John Aetheling, he sent me a reply, explaining the situation, and asking if we would consider sheltering some of the remaining students."

"Of course, I acquiesced. Within a few short hours, he had begun to transport the remaining students here. Though he knew little of our ways, he proved remarkably adept at fighting off anything that threatened his students, and even more important, he helped us to wall off the tunnels, preventing the flood waters from drowning us all."

"That was when the problems began down here."

"With the tunnels sealed off as they were, the territory underneath the city was reduced by a full third. Though none could complain about the tunnels being blocked, some of the members of our opposition felt that this indicated a need for increased attacks on my people."

"This was the true beginning of what some have come to call the Morlock War. The attacks from the other side, which we now call simply the Others, became more and more frequent, more vicious as well. Something was driving them to fight with greater ferocity than ever before."

"She showed up about ten years after the Change. John stayed down here to look after the students when we sealed the tunnels, and had since taken an active role in fighting the Others. He and two of the students were out on a scouting trip one day when they came across her."

"John recognized her immediately. He seemed to indicate that the two of them had some sort of relationship before things had gone south. In truth, I did not recognize her at first. She was near catatonia. Her eyes did not track, and she could not or would not speak. John cared for her over the next couple of years, but there was no change, for better or worse."

"One day, there was a raiding party which made it all the way to our central location, which was elsewhere at the time. John and several of the others managed to hold them off at the doors, but one of them proved too quick. He possessed some kind of super-speed, and slid easily past the defenses. "

"Mimi woke up?" It was less of a question and more a statement of certainty. Somehow he knew that she would have woken if threatened.

Caliban nodded. "The creature attacked our wounded first, slaughtering those who lay in the beds. Mimi was simply laying there, staring at nothing, much as she always did at the time. When the fiend's knife came down upon her though, she simply wasn't there."

"In the space of an instant, she had teleported. Truly teleported. It wasn't like her former ability to speed herself up when she had a direct line of sight. She simply disappeared from one point and reappeared in the other."

"She broke his neck without a thought, and went on a brief rampage amongst the other attackers. By the time everything had settled back down, her eyes had shifted from white to black, and she no longer remembered her name, or anything else."

"John quizzed her incessantly. He knew much of the mind and it's machinations, and he managed to determine that the memories of who she was were still locked away inside her, behind barriers he simply couldn't breach. He died some time later, trying a hypnosis technique upon her to unlock those memories."

Tristan nodded, beginning to understand where this story was leading. "You've not said anything about your vision."

Caliban shuddered briefly, a motion which many would not have caught. "It was when she first woke up, and killed the enemy soldier. I was directing some of my people towards the back of the tunnels so that they might hide if the others passed through."

"It was the strongest vision I've ever received in my long life. You stood triumphant over the corpse of your enemy, fading even as you cried out your victory."

"But that changed. There was blackness, and the sound of rushing water. And there was something else. I heard a voice, calling out to you, feeding you power, feeding your anger and rage, drawing you towards it."

"And then I saw you here, in the library upstairs, hanging something upon the walls, and I saw you, with Mimi, talking to her."

Caliban's words died off but Tristan prompted him to keep going. "Tell me all of it, Caliban. Hold back from me now and I swear to you, you'll never live to see your precious visions come true."

He swallowed, taking a deep breath, trying, obviously, to calm himself. "In the last vision, I saw you standing amongst a circle of flowers, surrounded by other people. Shadows, mostly, indistinct features and faces. You looked, at peace, for a moment, and then I saw you, and the others, again, fighting against some sort of monster, who was indistinct and not really there."

"Then I saw you as you were a week ago, wrathful and destructive. I saw you killing me, and Mimi, and countless others, only to die yourself at the hands of the same monster. I saw fire spilling forth from you and consuming everything in its wake. The tunnels collapsed, the library burned, and everything that I've fought for so long to protect gone in a wash of ash and wind."

Caliban stopped speaking for a moment, and Tristan could hear the soft sobs as he fought to control his tears.

"Tristan, I still have much to tell you, but my voice needs a break and you should rest some more. Still, if you would answer a question for me, I'd appreciate it."

Looking up at the old man, Tristan felt a mixture of anger and pity. "Go ahead and ask, I'll do my best to answer."

"Nothing has gone the way I expected it to. You have come back to us, yes, but you are so full of rage and hate, so close to becoming that second image that I've held in my nightmares for so long. Whatever happened to the young man that I used to know? The one who was so kind hearted and good, so ready to fight for the things he believed in?"

Tristan locked eyes with Caliban for the first time since he'd entered.

"He died."

- CHAPTER END -


End file.
